Page 10 of Azyr: Drifiting for Her

“You do the thing I do.” I nodded at the mess of names between us. “You see the whole system at once. You just aim it at people instead of coastlines.”

She went still, the way I was learning meant I’d landed too near something true, then pulled the file back to her side. “Coastlines don’t file complaints.” She went back to work, and the deflection was so exactly the move I would have made that I had to study the table a while.

That became the pattern as days passed. She’d bring me the broken piece, I’d find the fracture, she’d find the person caught in the fracture, and somewhere in the third hour one of us would say a thing that had nothing to do with the work. The other would pretend not to notice. She learned to read the blue at my wrists. I learned she brewed her tea too strong on purpose, to have something to wince at.

On the third late night she stopped mid-sentence, pen in the air. “Can I ask you something that isn’t on any agenda?”

“You have not respected the agenda since the first session.”

“Fair.” She set the pen down and turned her chair to face me instead of the desk. “The eleven systems. Do you ever go back to any of them?”

“No.”

“Ever want to?”

I considered lying. She’d have caught it, and catching me would have cost something. I didn't want to break trust. “There is no reason to return to a place I have finished charting. The map is complete. The place has nothing left to tell me.”

“Huh.” She sat with that. “That is the saddest thing anyone has ever said to me, and I send people off the planet forever for a living.”

“It was not meant to be sad.”

“I know. That’s the part that gets me.” She studied me the way she studies a file she suspects of lying. “So nowhere gets a second visit. Nothing’s worth going back for? Ever?”

“That has been the arrangement.”

“Has been.” She caught the tense. Of course she caught the tense. She picked the pen up again before either of us had to do anything about it, which was a mercy, because the blank space where my answer should have gone felt less like discipline and more like a door I’d been leaning on that had come quietly off the latch.

It was that evening, walking the block because she wanted the air and I didn't want the night to end, that I made the second mistake.

“So.” Hands in her pockets, collar up against the wet. “Have you actually seen the neighborhood, or do you go room to office to room like a very tall, very blue ghost?”

“I have seen the neighborhood.”

“Prove it. What’s out here?”

I should have offered her something small. I gave her the street. Fourteen gardens on the east side, eleven on the west, one dead and uncleared. The crack outside the bakery that forks like a river delta. The window box three houses down with the geraniums. The exact count of steps from the corner to her stoop. I gave it to her flat and precise, the way I’d read back a coastline, and I was most of the way through before I felt her stop walking beside me.

“How long have you been here?”

“Twelve days.”

“You memorized my whole street in twelve days.”

There was a thing in how she said it that I understood and she didn’t, yet. I memorized every place I passed through. She was asking why I had chosen to hand this one back to her. The blue climbed my hands before I could get it down, and she caught it.

I could have told her the truth on the wet pavement. My leave had been for a week. I had already broken it. I had memorized her as I had never let myself memorize a home, and it frightened me. Second opening I’d been handed.

“It’s a Veyathi trait.” I kept my voice flat. “We hold spatial memory the way humans hold language. I couldn’t forget your street if I tried. It means nothing.”

“Right.” She didn’t believe me, and she didn’t push.

We walked on. The rain had stopped without committing to it, which made me wonder if that was an Earth or Portland thing..

“For the record,” she offered, “nobody has ever memorized my street and recounted it to me. People have trouble with my coffee order.”

“Your coffee order is objectively difficult.”

“It’s oat milk, Azyr.”