Starlight Sentinel spread seven distress calls across the rooftop table and could not choose one. Each was a frontier world going dark. Each was a settlement no other champion had answered. She was a red-and-gold figure from a 1950s comic, dropped into the city of Lacuna a year ago and still not used to the weight of real choices. Back in the pages, a caption would have pointed her at the right planet by panel three. Here, the ink stayed quiet. She smoothed the top page flat. A mining colony had gone silent four days ago. A farming moon had lost contact yesterday. While she compared casualty numbers, a courier climbed the stairs and left an eighth call at her elbow. She did not open it. Every hour she delayed, another settlement stopped answering, and she knew what waiting felt like from the inside. When her comic closed, she lost time, purpose, herself. She did not want to think about it. She refused to leave those colonies inside a version of that. Velvet Mirage stepped out from the lounge doors carrying two glasses and set one down without asking. "Relax. I already know why you came up here." Starlight had not come up there. Velvet's rooftop simply drew problems. Velvet tapped the stack with one finger. "You are trying to weigh seven griefs on the same scale. You will sit here until there are ten." She slid a folded slip from her sleeve and laid it over the distress calls. A name. A set of coordinates. A frontier world called Halven's Reach, two weeks abandoned, still transmitting. "Every other champion has crossed this one off. I am giving it to you first. I keep the favor." Starlight looked at the slip, then at the seven pages beneath it. Choosing Halven's Reach meant the other six kept going dark while she flew. Not choosing meant all of them did. She folded the six pages together and put them in her belt. She took the slip. "I owe you," she said. Velvet smiled without teeth. "You do." Starlight stood, cape catching the wind off the roof, and stopped being a woman with seven problems. She was a woman with one world and a debt she did not yet understand.