Dr. Iona Vale (Human)

Iona hated the word teleportation the way a surgeon hates the word magic. It made a brief, brutal coherence agreement between two points in space sound like nothing was being spent to hold it together — as if the only ingredients were power, precision, and the fact that she happened to be looking at the exact spot where a breathing human body was about to reappear.

There was always a cost. Her entire job was making sure someone paid it on purpose instead of by accident.

"Maintain position," she told the trapped tech, voice flat over the comm, because flat was what held under pressure. "Do not turn your head. Do not move your feet." Two instructions. Simple ones. The only kind a man three minutes from unconsciousness could still follow.

She drove the harmonic pulse.

It landed the way it always landed: a white spike behind her own eyes first, sympathetic and useless, and then the real one — a full-body convulsion of signal and muscle memory as two points in space agreed, briefly and expensively, to be the same point. The clinical files compared it to electroconvulsive therapy. Iona had stopped finding that comparison dramatic sometime in her first year on this ring. It was accurate. That was worse.

Petrenko arrived inside the ring hard enough to go down on one knee, coughing, alive. Alive was the only word in that sentence she let herself feel anything about yet.

She sat down afterward, because her own hands had started shaking, and sitting was cheaper than explaining to anyone watching that fear wasn't what was doing it. Neurological recoil. A body paying its own small share of what it had just been asked to survive.

"Post-jump checks," she said, teeth close together. "Now. Him first. Then me."

She logged both exposures because protocol required it, and added the line protocol didn't, because five years on this ring had taught her to: repeated short-window jumps raise anxiety scores, drop mood stability, and burn through central fatigue reserves faster than any rest cycle replaces them. Nobody on this station had ever thanked her for that sentence. She kept writing it in the same words every time anyway, because a warning that changed its wording each time was a warning nobody could hold her to.