Zedd was quiet for a moment, and it was not a reluctant quiet, just the quiet of someone organizing where to start. "Epsilon Prime" he said. "Mining colony, fringe of Federation space. My parents were both engineers, worked the extraction operations. Everything there ran on the company and what the company needed and there wasn't a lot of room left over for much else."

"That's where the engineering comes from, then."

"That's where everything comes from, really." He shifted, getting more comfortable, his hand moving idly against her shoulder. "By the time I was ten I could take apart and rebuild most of the equipment on that colony without anyone showing me how. My parents kept me in books on physics and tech because that was the one thing the colony had plenty of, salvage and broken machinery and time to figure it out." He paused. "It wasn't a bad childhood exactly. It just felt small. Like the walls were always a little too close."

"So you left."

"At eighteen. Bag of my own things, whatever skills I had, and I got on the first freighter headed somewhere else and didn't look back." He looked toward the viewport. "Spent a few years working freelance on merchant ships. Learned a lot of ships that way, what breaks, what doesn't, how to fix things with whatever's on hand."

"And eventually New Ferenginar."

"Eventually New Ferenginar." He was quiet a moment, and there was a flicker of something behind his eyes, the look of a man deciding how much of a locked door to open, and then he let it go and shrugged lightly instead. "There's more to that part than I usually get into. Not today, maybe. It's a long story and most of it isn't a quiet-afternoon kind of story."

"That's fair" Lindsy said, easy about it, no push behind it at all. "I wasn't fishing. Family's enough for now, if you've got any."

"Just my parents, far as I know. Lara and Jaxon, still on Epsilon Prime probably, still working the company same as always. We don't talk much. Different lives." He shrugged lightly. "Your turn. Rigel. House Vaelor. I know the name carries some weight in trade circles but I never asked what that actually meant growing up."

Lindsy was quiet for a moment, the kind of quiet that came before something that mattered. "Middle class trade house" she said. "Not the kind that makes headlines, but comfortable. Established. We specialized in navigation and corridor analysis, and over a few generations that turned into real merchant relationships across half the quadrant. My father still runs it. Kaerin. My mother Selyra handles the client side." She paused. "I have a brother, Tavren, older, groomed for the house since he could walk. And a sister, Ilyss, younger, who found her own way out in a different direction than I did."

"Different direction meaning."

"I didn't need the house to make a living, that was never the issue. I left because I wanted the work to be mine, not just my piece of something my father built." She shrugged slightly. "Went through guild training on Rigel, then took contracts with the Antican Collective doing frontier route work. Genuinely dangerous routes, gravimetric instability, conflict zones, the kind of work that paid well because nobody sane wanted it, and the kind of work House Vaelor would never have sent me on."

"That's a hell of a departure for someone who didn't need the money."

"It wasn't about the money." She was quiet a moment. "After that I did several years with the Karemma Trade Authority. Dominion logistics. That part actually was the best pay I'd ever seen, but by then it wasn't about that either."

"What was it about, then."

"The precision required suited me. And for a long time that was enough." She looked toward the viewport. "But everything I routed for them was in service of something bigger than commerce. Supply lines that kept territory under control regardless of what the people living there wanted. I was good at the work and believed in very little of what it was for, and after a while that gap got harder to ignore." She shrugged slightly. "So I went independent. Full choice of contracts, no route serving an agenda I hadn't agreed to."

"And that's how you ended up answering a recruitment posting in a cantina."

"That's how I ended up answering a recruitment posting in a cantina." A small smile. "Best three point eight I never quite got to four."

"You negotiated like you already had the job."

"I did have the job. I just made you feel like you'd won something." She tipped her head back to look at him properly. "You hired the right navigator, for what it's worth."

"I noticed pretty quick." He was quiet a moment. "Mining kid and trade house daughter. Neither of us ended up where we were supposed to."