The Last Echo of Sector 7

The distress beacon had been repeating for three hundred years.

In the lawless fringe of Sector 7, three-hundred-year-old signals usually meant one of two things: a hull full of degraded, useless scrap, or a lethal trap left behind by long-dead raiders. But Jax was down to his last half-liter of oxygen-scrubber fluid, and his ship, The Rustbucket, was practically running on hope and duct tape. He changed course.

The bell above the door chimed, but Elias didn’t look up. His world was entirely contained within the three-inch circle of a tarnished silver pocket watch.

Elias was a horologist—a fixer of time. His shop in the narrow alleys of the city smelled of brass polish, aged wood, and the faint, metallic scent of clock oil. The watch currently on his workbench had been brought in earlier that morning by a young woman. “It was my grandfather’s,” she had said, tracing the engraved initials on the casing. “It hasn’t ticked since he came back from the war. Fifty years.”