Page 3 of Azyr: Drifiting for Her

I let that word sit there with all the weight it carried. There was a starting point of the last eight years that began with a fever season on my homeworld and a message that reached me late. With it came three names I didn't say aloud. Even though I had surveyed eleven systems since then, I still couldn’t speak them.

The next morning, I filed for a week of personal leave. First contact through the standard human protocol; transit booked. I couldn't offer a better explanation than curiosity, so I used that one and reached for the case.

The case. I had owned it for a decade and had never once fully unpacked it. Unpacking meant I was staying, and I had a rule about staying. Though I would not have called it a rule. I packed in an hour. It didn't take an hour to pack. It took an hour because I kept stopping, picking up instruments I didn’t need for a week on a temperate world that had been fully mapped and contained a civilization. I looked over the tools… a deep-cold sampling rig, a spectrometer, a spare thermal shell. Eventually, I set them down, unable to say whether I was packing for a week or using them for something my hands could stay busy with.

Then I went through the long transit, and the relativistic arithmetic of it, the way the ship’s clock and the world’s clock slid apart, just so that I would arrive in time. Somewhere in the middle of it, past the point where a message could have reached me either way, I realized I had not once considered she might say no. It had never entered my consideration. I mapped for a living. I charted every branch of a route before I flew it, every place the ice might be thin. And I had flown this one without charting the most obvious branch, because some part of me had already decided what her answer would be. It seemed so obvious to me.

So here I was, standing on Failing Street with the scanner in my hand and the blue door in front of me. I made myself move across the road. The garden in front of her building was the alive kind, flowers in purple, blue, and pink, and something silver I didn't have a human name for. I catalogued them without an active thought to do so. Someone here had decided that the small daily work of keeping a living thing alive is worth doing in the same place, every day, for years, and it was so foreign to me that I stood under the window longer than I meant to, looking at the plants and the worn place on the doorframe where a hand went every day.

I raised my hand to announce myself. The blue tint of my skin was all the way up to my knuckles now, and I didn’t try to stop it. There was no one to see it. In a moment there would be, and she would not know how to read it. I would have a week to be a formality in her city and then leave the way I always left, cleanly, without fully unpacking, and before a place could become anything more than temporary.

That was the plan. I believed it the way I had believed all the others.

I knocked.

CHAPTER 3

Astoria

I knew who it was before I opened the door, and I opened it anyway, because self-preservation has never once been my strong suit.

Four days after the decline. Four days of telling exactly nobody, of answering Priya's raised eyebrow with a stack of transit forms, of watering the thyme on schedule, of sleeping like garbage, and deciding every single morning that the whole thing was finished.

The system recorded my no. The system honored my no. I built the part of the system that honored the no. So when the knock came at the end of the day… low, even, two taps and a pause then nothing. I told myself it must be a courier and went to the door with my cardigan sliding off one shoulder and my reading glasses shoved up into my hair.

He filled the whole frame of it.

I spent a long time afterward trying to describe him and getting it wrong every time. Tall, sure, but that wasn't it. The thing was that his edges wouldn't hold still. In the wet gray coming off the street he was the color of almost nothing, pale blue washing out to clear at the shoulders and the backs of his hands. Where my hallway light caught him he darkened, a blue that welled up and sank back before it could spread. He was holding a Survey Corps scanner loose in a hand that had plainly forgotten it was there. I knew what it was because I'd read his species file multiple times every day and then tried very hard to forget I owned it.

“Astoria Wellington.” The way he said my name made me forget the sentence I had prepared.

“You’re Azyr.” My voice stayed professional. The rest of me was having considerable difficulty.

He tipped his head. Then he said something, and the translator at his collar caught it a half-second late, and what it handed me, in a mild machine contralto, was:

“I have wanted to be inside you since the first document.”

We both went very still.

Here was a fun fact about my job. I had been in the room for every flavor of first-contact malfunction there was. The mangled hellos. The accidental proposals. One time a Kthari elder's formal proposal came out of the box as an order for two dozen eggs, and I had to keep a straight face while an excited human got offered breakfast.

I had a whole calm register for exactly this situation. And I stood in my own doorway at the end of a long wet day and couldn't find it with both hands and a map. My face was hot. He watched me with the polite, total attention of a man who didn't understand my reaction but planned to remember it forever. Which was, honestly, worse. Or better. I couldn't tell which.

Years of professional composure, and here I was doing an impression of a woman who had never once heard a sentence before.

“The unit is.” He stopped. Touched the collar. When he spoke again he'd slowed way down, spacing every word out, feeding the machine as little as he could to ruin. “The unit renders my grammar poorly. I said, I have wanted to meet you. Since I read the document your office wrote. The intake philosophy.” A pause. “Not.” Another one. “Not the other thing.”

“I got the other thing.”

“Yes.”

“Loudly.”

“Yes.” His face twitched at the corner of his mouth that on a human I'd have filed under mortified, and along the backs of his hands the blue ticked up half a shade. I noticed it. Then I shoved the observation somewhere I didn't want to look and slammed the lid. I'd met his species before. The creeping color meant something… something I didn't have the capacity to handle right now. I'd already declined his match, so his happy color change didn't matter.

Then I did my thing, because it was the only thing I had left. I was a professional, so I put on my little professional hat and took over the situation. I put a hand on the doorframe, which set my body across the gap in a way that wasn't quite a welcome, and I used the same matter-of-fact voice I always used when I thought someone would listen the first time. “Okay. Azyr. I'm going to be straight with you, because I'd want somebody to be straight with me. You came through the standard first-contact protocol, and that protocol is real, and I honor it. But I declined the match. Four days ago. It should have hit your channel.”

“I didn't receive it.” He looked down at the scanner. “My request cleared before I left transit range.” When he looked back at me, the blue had faded from his hands. “I understand. I will not ask you to change your decision.”