Page 9 of Azyr: Drifiting for Her

“It took eleven minutes.”

“It would have taken me a week.”

“You do not have a week.” I put one finger on the dead-ended route. “That is the first hole. You are the second.”

Her head came up. “Excuse me.”

“Nine of your forty depend on a single person each. You depend on no one, because you are the single person for all forty. If you become ill , the Pacific Northwest loses its entire human-support layer until you recover.” I moved my finger to the blank center of the diagram, the space where she was not drawn. “There is no version of you on this map. You built a system to catch everyone and left yourself out of it.”

She opened her mouth. Closed it. Pulled the file across the desk, turned it toward herself, and read her own absence off the page, and I understood I had said a thing I couldn't take back.

“Fix it, then.” Her voice had gone quiet. “Since you can apparently see it.”

So we fixed it. Which was the mistake, or the start of it, because fixing it meant working, and working meant hours.

We got stuck on one. A matched human named Colleen, one advocate, the advocate who’d stopped answering.

“Assign her a new advocate.” She was already reaching for the roster. “That’s the fix. Who’s free?”

“Why did the avocate stop?”

“People get busy. That’s not the puzzle. The puzzle is who catches Colleen now.”

“The avocate is on three other maps.” I turned the file so she could see. “All four lost contact in the same month. We should find out why, but meanwhile the backup cannot depend on her being available.”

She stared at the three names for a long moment. “That’s four people I have to re-cover. Not one.”

“Yes.”

“I hate you a little.”

“That is the correct response to a survey. Nobody thanks the man who charts the reef.”

She almost smiled. She fought it down, the way she fights everything down, and then she dragged her chair around to my side of the desk, close enough that her sleeve sat against mine. We re-covered all four. She didn't move the chair back, and I didn't mention the chair.

She made a small triumphant noise when the last fix clicked into place, then caught herself making it.

“Did you just cheer for a support diagram?”

“I didn't.”

“You made a noise. There was a distinct noise.”

“There was no noise.”

“I’m putting it in the file. Subject celebrates spreadsheets.”

“You do not have a file on me.” She looked at me and didn't answer.

“You’re doing it again.” An hour later, eyes still on the page.

“Doing what?”

“Watching me instead of the file.”

“You are more interesting than the file.”

“It’s a spreadsheet, Azyr. That is a low bar, and you have cleared it insultingly.”