Page 21 of Single Pucking Orc

“Rognar,” Petrov said softly. “Man. What do you need?”

“I don’t know yet.” He laughed, and it came out rough. “Sleep. A time machine. Somebody named Deb. I’ve got the next few days duct-taped together with a neighbor and a nanny agency and prayer, and after that I genuinely have no idea, and I’ve got to be on the ice in four minutes, so.”

“You got pictures?” Fen asked.

“Obviously I have pictures, I have four hundred pictures, I’ve had her since yesterday⁠—”

And the room surged forward again, an entire team of enormous orcs crowding around one cracked phone screen to look at pictures of a six-month-old with light green skin and two tiny tusks.

Then he got his skates on and went out and had a genuinely terrible practice.

It wasn’t dramatically terrible and he was never a danger to anybody. He was simply half a second late on everything, because he’d only slept for two hours in a rocking chair. Half a second happened to be the entire sport. He missed a pass he would have made in his sleep, and Grimshaw walked right around him in a one-on-one drill, and Grimshaw was thirty-eight and had told him so at length afterward. During a rush drill he stopped dead at the blue line for no reason anybody could see. He couldn’t remember writing down when Charlie last ate.

He had written it down. It was on the paper on the refrigerator and he knew perfectly well that it was, and he checked his phone in the tunnel anyway.

“Stonebreaker.”

Brogan had come off the ice behind him and was standing there with his mask pushed up, enormous and grey-bearded and entirely unhurried, blocking most of the light.

“Brogan.”

“How much did you sleep?”

He opened his mouth to say something charming and found nothing. Brogan waited because Brogan always waited, and he never helped anybody out by talking first. He stood there with the water bottle in one hand, and the silence went on and on, and it kept being his turn to speak.

“Two hours,” he said finally. “Give or take.”

Brogan nodded slowly, as though a number had been confirmed rather than volunteered.

“Sleep when she sleeps.”

“That’s what the internet says.”

“The internet’s right about that one.” He pulled a glove off with his teeth. “You’ll want to argue with it, because when she goes down you’ll finally have two hands and the whole house will need doing. Don’t. The house can rot. Sleep.”

“Okay.”

Brogan looked down at Rognar with an expression that gave away exactly nothing.

“You gonna say something else,” Rognar asked, “or is that the whole thing?”

Brogan started past him back up the tunnel, then stopped. “Ice in two minutes.”

Rognar stood in the tunnel with his helmet hanging from one hand and hated him a little, for being the only male in the building who had seen past the humor.

Then his phone buzzed against his hip.

Nora: 6:40—2 oz, mostly for the comfort of it

Nora: 7:05—asleep

Nora: 7:52—awake, extremely pleased about it

Nora: 8:15—3 oz, plus most of a pear

He read it twice, standing in the cold with the sweat cooling on the back of his neck. She had kept his daughter a ledger. Four entries in a bookkeeper’s shorthand, timestamped to the minute. That was apparently what Nora Bennett did with anything she had agreed to be responsible for, whether it was the Hendricks account or a baby who had strong-armed her with a smile.

Then, thirty seconds later.