Between Erasures

Written with AI assistance. Maro Voss fixes things for a living and has no plans to fix anything else. He works a twelve-hour shift on a fuel depot nobody talks about, sends money to a sister he hasn't seen in years, and keeps his head down. He is nobody in particular. Then a docking alarm goes off in the middle of the night and he makes a choice that takes less than a minute and costs him the next decade of his life. What follows is not a rescue and not a redemption — it is the slow, brutal, occasionally beautiful education of a man who discovers that the thing he was saving for was never the thing he was alive for.