"Nova, the satellite data's doing that thing again."
Nova Castaneda lifted her head from her third cup of coffee, NASA's fluorescent lights carving shadows under her eyes. The clock read 11:47 PM—another sixteen-hour day bleeding into tomorrow while she juggled orbital mechanics and mystical library shifts. The overtime would cover half of Stella's next treatment. Maybe.
"What thing, Marcus?" She minimized the spreadsheet calculating how many more double shifts she'd need before her sister's medical bills bankrupted them both.
Marcus pointed at his screen with the enthusiasm of a man discovering his own execution date. "The star trajectory data keeps... rearranging itself. Like it's trying to spell something."
Nova's synesthesia kicked in before she could stop it—the satellite trajectories translating into a funeral dirge in B-flat, the same note that had haunted her dreams since her parents' plane went down. Her eidetic memory catalogued every coordinate shift with mechanical precision while her stomach churned with cosmic wrongness.
"Probably just a software glitch," she lied, moving to his workstation. The screen pulsed with impossible patterns—stellar coordinates that shouldn't exist, orbital paths that defied physics. Her hands trembled as she recognized the formation her grandmother had drawn obsessively in her final years: Cassiopeia inverted, its W flipped into M for Muerte.
Death.
The data screamed at her in frequencies only she could hear, and Nova's hands moved without her permission, fingers dancing across Marcus's keyboard. The wrongness intensified—reality hiccupping like a broken transmission—until the coordinates snapped into clarity:
DEATH COMES AT SATURN'S RETURN.
