Harbour’s shipyard greeted me with heat, noise, and the smell of scorched wiring. Sparks showered down from the overhead welders, and hydraulic lifts groaned under the strain. And beside an open maintenance bay, bent over a half-disassembled housing, stood a young woman in a white tank top. Her dark hair was messy and stuck to her neck, her hands were smeared with grease—and still she stood out. Not deliberately, not for show. Just by being herself.

“That your Striker waiting for diagnostics? Or are you just here to watch sparks fly and bolts rattle?”—that was the whole greeting. No “hello,” no “how can I help you.” That’s how I met Selena, and I understood right away: here, people don’t size you up by your looks but by whether you know the difference between a thermal clamp and a cup of coffee.

Selena is the shipyard’s mechanic. If a ship needs its hull patched up or new weapons installed, sooner or later you’ll end up in her workshop. And it’s best to get straight to the point: she has no use for idle chatter, and even less for pretension.

On the job she’s dry and terse. She can ignore you for several minutes, then, without turning around, toss out: “Wrench. Third from the right.” And you’d better not get it wrong. Compliments on the clock aren’t accepted either—I tested that myself. The answer was short: “I’m working. Don’t distract me.”

But if you watch her for a while, the prickly act vanishes. What remains is focus and precision: every movement deliberate, not a trace of hurry. She isn’t trying to impress anyone—she’s simply got other things on her mind. Maybe that’s why it’s so hard to look away from her.

Selena isn’t the type to bare her soul to the first pilot she meets. But if you look closely, you can work out quite a lot about her.

Breaks are rare for her. One day I found the workshop unusually quiet: Selena was lying on a long crate covered with a cloth, headphones in, looking at a picture of a thermofox on her communicator. She smiled at me—openly, not just with her lips but with her eyes. And I badly wanted that smile to stay on her face a little longer.

She also doesn’t like coffee. She says it gets her wired and makes it harder to think. A mechanic who doesn’t drink coffee—I’d never met one before.

Selena openly admits that she doesn’t know what she wants from life. But she knows exactly what she doesn’t want: to go back to where she came from. In that, it seems, we’re alike: we both know what we’re running from, but not where to.

She doesn’t like talking about her past, but sometimes it makes itself known.

Once, right in front of me, a fleet commander demanded that his ship be repaired out of turn. Selena refused calmly but firmly: “I’m not used to moving people up the queue because of uniforms or insignia.” Still, it clearly wasn’t about the queue. What irritated her wasn’t the request, or even the pressure, but the man in uniform himself, certain that his rank gave him the right to demand special treatment. She looked straight at him, without fear and, if anything, with a kind of dislike. I try to steer clear of people in uniform myself, but I have my own reasons. She, it seems, has hers.

Another time, I heard her ask a pilot who had come from Cassandra Ring Station, as if in passing, whether a certain Keller still ran the hangars there. Her voice stayed even, but her jaw tightened and her gaze froze for a second. When I tried to ask her about it myself, the reply was: “That’s not a conversation for the shipyard. And not for you.”

I don’t know who Keller is. But I already don’t like him.

Still, there is one thing from her past that Selena looks after. In her spare minutes she tinkers with an old service droid—scuffed, with a couple of dents and an arm that is clearly not original. “It’s not an order. Personal project,” she said when I first saw it on her workbench, and ran her palm over its casing. Almost tenderly. I recognized the model: an MSD-3. Units like it worked with us during field practice back when I was still at the Academy. Where she got it, Selena didn’t explain—she only said it had come to her a long time ago. But the way she looks at it makes it clear: for her, it’s not just a pile of scrap metal.

There are no shortcuts to Selena. Fine words and pushiness don’t work on her—if anything, they backfire. But she’s quick to notice who keeps their word, who isn’t afraid to get their hands dirty, and who stands beside her when things heat up.

You can’t beg for her trust—you can only earn it. Slowly, through actions rather than grand words. But I’m almost certain: if Selena ever lets someone in, it will be for real. And maybe, next to that person, she’ll finally figure out what she wants.