Gale Koss tried to file herself as a specimen, and the tool refused. She stood inside the Sunken Species Archive, a hall of wet stone and rusted metal, its walls carved with fish and coral no one funded anymore. Her jumpsuit hung faded on her frame, patched at the shoulder with woven alien fiber. She held her Archive tool to her own chest and pressed record. The screen asked for a name. She gave hers. Then it asked for a species. There she stopped. The fiber patch was not decoration. Under it, her skin had changed. A month ago it began to harden into pale plates, like the shell of the moss-crawler she once named. She had stopped filing reports for the Archive. Now she wanted one report only: her own entry, logged as a new organism. But the tool held names and records. It could catalog a creature someone brought her. It could not read a body that was still becoming something. She scrolled its fields. Origin world. Collection date. Habitat. Every field wanted a finished thing. None wanted a woman halfway between two forms. She typed "unknown" into the species field. The tool blanked the entry and returned to the start. She tried again. Blank again. Her hands, part shell now, knocked against the casing. Zyleth found her there, still trying. The purple alien crossed the hall in three quick steps, her lizard riding her shoulder. Zyleth had walked the deep levels of Nautilus with Gale, and she trusted Gale's tool with her own people's records. She looked at the blank screen, then at the plates spreading up Gale's neck. "You are filing yourself," Zyleth said. Not a question. "It won't take me," Gale said. "It only records what's done growing." Zyleth took the tool. She did not soften it. "Then do not file a species. File observations. Date. What the skin does. Measure. Log again next week." She tapped a field meant for specimen notes and turned it into a running log. "A record is not one entry. It is many, over time." Gale stared. She had built her whole trade on final names. One creature, one file, closed. She had never logged a thing that kept changing under her hand. She took the tool back. In the notes field she wrote the date. She wrote: skin hardening, shoulder to jaw, twenty days. She measured a plate with her thumb and logged the width. She pressed save. The entry held. It did not blank. Her name sat at the top of an open file now, with one line under it and room for more. She was no longer a blank. She was a record in progress. "It stayed," Gale said. "It stayed," Zyleth agreed. "Now you must keep coming back. The entry is not finished. Neither are you."

The crate held every day of Gale's record now. But it drank power by the hour. Axel had said it plain: steady draw, no ships, no fuel. Gale sat still in the stone hall. She could not speak. She could not move her hands. She could only wait and let the others fight for her log. Axel knelt by the crate and watched its lights fade. "Battery's half gone," he said. His Australian drawl stayed flat. "Two days, maybe three. Then the whole thing sleeps and your record rots." He looked at the robotic dog beside him. The dog's amber eye still swept Gale's face and wrote each number. "Clever box. Dead box, soon." Zyleth crossed the hall. She did not stop to think out loud. "There is power here," she said. "My people did not live in the dark with no current." Her lizard rode her shoulder, its star-marks bright. It turned its head toward the far wall and went still. Zyleth followed its stare. "There. It feels something behind the stone." They pried loose a panel of old metal. Behind it sat a box, teal and scarred, a yellow warning sign stamped on its face. A heavy lever hung on one side. Axel wiped grime from the casing. "High voltage. Live main." He grinned without warmth. "These purple folk wired the whole hall and walked off." Zyleth set her glowing hand on the box. A hum woke under the metal. "It takes my blood," she said. "Like the doors above. It knows my line." She looked at Axel. "You splice the crate to this. I hold it open." Axel worked fast. He ran a cable from the crate's port to a terminal inside the box. His hands were sure. "One wrong touch and this fries me, the crate, and every day she logged," he said. "So don't talk to me." He stripped the lead, pressed it to the contact, and threw the lever. Sparks jumped. The dog's eye flickered. Gale's chest went tight in the dark behind her stone. Then the crate's lights ran green, blue, orange, steady and even. The hum settled into a low, constant note. Axel sat back on his heels. "She's drawing clean," he said. "Straight off the main. No battery. No ship. Never runs dry." Zyleth lifted her hand from the box. The hum held without her. "Done," she said. "The hall feeds her now." Gale could not see the lights. But she felt the cable settle and the dog resume its work beside her. The record would not go dark. It lived on the station's own current, written each morning while she sat sealed in stone. Axel stood and brushed his knees. He frowned at the terminal's dial. "Draw's higher than it should be," he said. "Something else on this line is pulling too. Deep in the hall." He looked at Zyleth. "We're not the only thing drinking down here."