“Come in.” I pull the archive up on the wall screens. The old grid unfolds across them in layers, forty years of it, load histories and failure logs and the survey maps stacked three deep.
Mara squeaks with happiness. “Show me the fault progression on the eastern relays. Cayzor, is this the full set or is there more behind it?”
Cayzor.
She says it easily, without thinking, the way she’s said it since the second time we spoke. I watch Andrew’s head come up half an inch.
“There’s more behind it,” I say. “The load histories go back another twenty years. I’ll bring them forward.”
“God, yes, bring it all forward, I want to swim in it.”
And we work.
In front of Andrew Wilson, I speak only of the grid. I do not mention the murder, my parents, or House Vaszneth. There is astranger in the room and eight years of instinct will not let me set the whole of it on a table in front of a being I haven’t cleared.
And I notice Mara does the same thing.
We never spoke of this ahead of time. She never told me she would keep my secrets. I never asked her to because it didn’t occur to me to ask, I forgot to, it should have been the first thing I said to her this morning and I said nothing. And it doesn’t matter, because she’s doing it anyway. Every time the conversation drifts near the edge, she steers it back to the grid, smooth and easy, without once glancing at me to check. She carries the worst secret of my life past her own brother like it’s hers to protect and it never occurred to her to do anything else. This small human guards the thing that has been killing me for eight years, unasked, from the being she loves most in the Four Sectors.
I understand that I trust her.
She keeps my secrets and I keep hers, not telling a single being, including her brother, about the pregnancy. I will only start to say something when I can visually confirm that she is beginning to tell others and then I will follow her lead. For now, I say nothing, not even to her.
Mara leans in over my shoulder to read a figure, and her arm is a hand’s width from mine. Her hair has come loose at the temple. I continue to love the sound of her voice. She works through her thoughts out loud, low, half to herself, and I could stand here and listen to her reason through a fault progression until the suns burn out.
My personal crystal continues to enjoy Mara too, warming in her presence.
She looks up from the screen and catches me watching her and doesn’t look away. Mara smiles at me, causing her features to become impossibly brighter.
Her scent shifts in the air between us.
That arousal is still there. Again. In my own office, with her brother three steps away bent over the other screen. Her body tells me plainly what her face is trying to avoid. And there is nothing — nothing — that I can do with this knowledge. My body doesn’t stir. It can’t. I am physically unable to become enflamed until the moment my bare claw touches her bare skin and the claiming reads positive. I wish I could perform that ceremony and have it come out true with this female. I would be proud to have her as my mate. And I think that she’ll only grow more beautiful the further along she gets in her pregnancy. In a few moons she’ll have a large, swollen belly and she’ll be lovelier than she is now.
She’s going to be a wonderful mother.
It’s not my child and Mara is not my female. My own scent told me so, plainly, in a kitchen last night. I believe my own scent, because a male who can’t believe his own nose has nothing left to stand on. And yet, I find myself wishing that I could have not only this female as mine, but the child she carries too.
“Cayzor.” Her voice has gone slightly rough. She clears it. “The screen has gone dark. Can you fix it please?”
“Yes.”
She turns back to the screen.
Her ears have gone pink.
We workthe old records for another hour, and while the two humans trace the eastern relays between them, my mind goes where it’s been going all afternoon.
The rosters.
The thing Mara handed me today that I’d been too busy hunting killers to see. The maintenance schedules, which include who wassupposedto have their hands in the grid. I pulled the archive last night, after I left her quarters, becauseI wasn’t going to sleep anyway, and now I’ve been through the most boring document in the mine. I’ve marked the beings who were down in the guts of that system on the days that matter.
Most of them are dead now, or off-world, but there’s one name I marked twice.
Ordek of Six.
He’s still here on Timbur, retired now and living in the comfortable seniors housing. He was facilities his entire working life and spent forty years in the tunnels of the mine and in the conduit and crawlspaces, in the parts of the grid nobody thinks about until they fail. He was on the schedule the fortnight before the first cascade. And he was on it again, two moons ago, before the second. And then he retired soon after.
I’ve known Ordek since I was a boy. He’s one of those beings who’ve simply always been here, part of the rock, gruff and slow and decent, who’d cuff a young miner around the ears for running in the shafts and then slip him a sweet from his pocket when the foreman wasn’t looking. He taught half this mine how not to die in it.
