Tovan Run-Tide

Tovan Run-Tide is going home, and he wishes he weren't.

He was born in Harbor-Call's wet-hab — one of those berth-kids who grew up with desert in every window and brine in every breath — and six years ago he took a registry berth on Khesret Prime because station decks paid better and nobody asked about tide-oaths at the hiring desk. He's thirty-eight, which for a Zatheeri is mid-current adult, and it shows: five feet of wiry slate-teal scales gone a little dull from dry station air, gold eyes with flat horizontal pupils, a tail he wraps tight when he's nervous. The tide-mark along his jaw — keloid pale lines the harbor council reads like a signature — has been covered with station makeup for half a decade. It didn't fool anyone who matters.

On the ramp he talks like a prodigal. He asks after Sira Moor-Call's kelp gallery, after the scoop tenders, after whether the council still serves that broth that tastes like apology. He's polite. He helps stow gear he wasn't asked to touch. He says thank you like he means it. What he doesn't say — what he won't say until the warden reads his mark — is that he took a station-side registry marriage without tide-council release, skipped six years of tide-dues back to his birth-fleet, and booked himself onto his cousin's prepaid kin-passage because running toward Harbor-Call looked more survivable than waiting on Khesret for the recall notice to find him.

He isn't coming home proud. He's coming home cornered. And the worst part, for a crew trying to read him, is that he might be a coward dodging a fair debt he signed with open eyes — or a man who ran from a coercive berth-oath the council wrote when he was twenty-two and too dock-shy to refuse. Both versions fit. He hasn't decided which one he is yet.