Page 1 of Azyr: Drifiting for Her

CHAPTER 1

Astoria

The banner came up on my screen at 8:42 in the morning, and the first thing I felt was a small hot embarrassment, because I was the one who had written it.

Congratulations. You have a compatibility result. Then the number, rendered in the soft teal the design team had chosen after I told them the old red was alarming. 91.3%. And under the number, in the recipient field, where I had watched eleven other names appear over four years and had learned to say each one gently, out loud, before I made the call: Wellington. Astoria Wellington. My own name, in my own template, in the font I had approved.

I sat frozen and let the coffee go cold in my hand.

The Earth Liaison Office opened at nine. I had eighteen minutes before Priya came in with the intake binders, and I spent the first four doing nothing at all, which was not like me. The radiator ticked. Gray, wet light fell across the windowsill garden: basil going leggy, a rosemary I’d had longer than the lease, three kinds of thyme in a chipped enamel tray.

On the wall to my left were the photographs. Twelve of them now, in mismatched frames I bought one at a time from the shop on Alberta, because it had felt wrong to line them up in identical black rectangles. I’d sat across from twelve people, guiding them through the disclosure packet, answering their impossible questions—“What if I hate it?” “What if he’s cruel?” “What if I get there and realize I’ve made the worst mistake imaginable?”—and ultimately, seeing them off at the transit hub. We’d hug, and they’d be sent off into a sky that wouldn’t return them on any meaningful timeline for those they left behind. Marisol, who cried the whole way there and laughed the whole way through security. The Nguyen sisters, matched to a pair of siblings on a water world, who made me promise to eat at the Vietnamese place by the airport on their behalf once a year, and I did. Twelve faces. I was good at those faces. I was the best in the region at the exact moment those faces needed someone to be good, just before they walked away forever.

In fact, I was so good at the goodbye that I had stopped noticing it was the only part of the process I ever did.

The message thread pinged.

A colleague from the Seattle office: did you see the funny one that came through overnight lol, small world.

And I understood, with a lurch, that my match was already circulating as a curiosity. Of course it was. It was the kind of joke the people who worked here couldn’t help. The woman who ran the Portland intake, matched. The one who wrote the counseling scripts, sitting on the other side of the desk for once.

Ha, I typed back. Small world.

I didn’t say anything else. I put the phone face down, and it sat there, impossible to ignore.

Four years ago I’d registered, in my second month at the reformed agency. At an all-staff meeting about transparency and consent, I’d decided I could hardly counsel people through registration without being willing to put my own name in the machine. So I ticked the box, uploaded the sample, and signed the disclosure I had nearly memorized. Then I went to lunch. I remembered the gesture better than the possibility I’d signed up for.

The machine had not gone on. It had kept my name in it the whole time, and this morning it had returned a result.

I opened the file and told myself I was opening it professionally, the way I opened everyone’s, and there was even a version of that which was true. I did want to see the results, even though I already knew what I was going to do about it.

Azyr.

One name, the way some of them came. Veyathi. I had processed one other Veyathi, years ago, a quiet man matched to a marine biologist from Astoria (the town, not me, though the coincidence had made the biologist laugh), and I remembered the species notes… a tidally locked homeworld, a people from the band of permanent twilight, a physiology that shifted with the light. Survey Corps. Cartographer, Intergalactic Survey Corps. Eleven charted systems. And then the line that did something to the back of my throat: under current residence, where every human file listed an apartment, a house, or, once, heartbreakingly, a shelter, his file said none on record: Survey vessel, itinerant.

No fixed address. A man with nothing in his file that had ever held still. He was essentially a nomadic alien. The complete opposite of me.

I wasn’t superstitious. I’d read the technical papers and sat through the briefings. Compatibility wasn’t fate; I had said those exact words to frightened people in this chair.

Still, the joke landed. Ninety-one point three percent, the highest result I’d seen at this desk, and it belonged to a man who never stayed anywhere long enough to get his mail. Did Veyathi even get mail? Electronic communication, obviously. But if either species had snails delivering it, my money was on his. I laughed once, alone in the office.

I looked back at his file. Twelve years in the same apartment. The same six blocks, the same route to the office, the same tray of thyme moved from windowsill to windowsill exactly once, when I switched rooms when the Portland office stopped renting office space and started working from home. Even that had felt like an upheaval.

I thought about David then, which I didn't usually let myself do at work. I thought about the particular quiet of the apartment the year I was twenty-eight, the way he had gotten smaller and smaller inside our life while I was busy, genuinely, generously busy, helping everyone else hold theirs together. That year, I was in graduate school for social work. I was good at it already… the monotony of ordinary life. I held space for my cohort, my clients, and the woman down the hall going through a divorce. Just like now, I came home each night feeling accomplished for having been useful.

Except I didn’t notice that the man I lived with had stopped putting his half of anything in. He left on a Tuesday, quietly, while I was at a study group I didn't need to be at but was deep into some new theory. The part I never got over wasn’t that he left. It was that nothing about it was dramatic enough to grab onto… just an absence where a person had been, one I only understood the size of slowly, by how often I reached for him out of habit and found nothing there.

After David, I told myself I was too busy with work and study for another relationship. It was a useful explanation. Nobody asked what I was afraid of.

I had built a different life after that. I chose the apartment for the light, the work for its purpose, and the garden for the daily proof that something grew when I stayed to tend it. I loved that life. It was not a consolation prize. Wanting more felt dangerously close to calling it one.

So I knew what I was going to do before I admitted I knew it.

I clicked through to the response screen. I had built this screen too. There was a green field and a gray field, Proceed to Introduction and Decline Match, and beneath them a line of small text I had fought the compliance team to keep human: Your decision is yours. It will be recorded and honored, and it does not close any door you may wish to open later. I remembered writing that. I remembered thinking about the woman it was for (some future frightened person, hovering) and being proud of it, of the care in it.

Reading it now, about myself, it wasn’t reassurance anymore. It was daring me.

I’d like to say I deliberated. I’d like to say I weighed it, the way I would have made a client weigh it, that I asked myself the questions I asked everyone. What are you afraid of, and is the fear telling you the truth or just keeping you company? I didn’t.