Page 21 of Ward

“No. But sometimes grown people ask for new ones.”

“Sometimes grown people get told no.”

“Sure,” her mother said, soft enough to be dangerous. “And sometimes nobody asks.”

“Mm. Send me the manifest when you crack him. And Tisha.” Her mother let the beat land, forty years of practice. “The stew travels. If it comes to that.”

“It’s not coming to that.”

“Sure, baby,” said her mother, magnificently unconvinced, and hung up to go turn off the ball game. Tisha stood in the service corridor for a while, holding the comm while her mother, as usual, saw straight through her at interplanetary range.

Her own kitchen, after — the real one, dark and banked, midnight-quiet, hers.

She should have gone to her bunk. Instead she was at the prep counter with the last of the wine nobody’d finished, going through tomorrow’s manifests she’d already done, because her hands wanted the work and her head wanted the room.

The station hummed. The proofing cabinet clicked.

Somewhere two decks up, presumably, a man in formal blues was standing in a grey room being furious at a pear.

You wear yours like they’re heavy.

She’d known better, was the thing.

She’d built the quiet campaign on not pushing — pot on, door open, no pressure on the walls — and then she’d stood there with a dish bin and pushed, one clean question straight into the load-bearing wall, because her mouth had wanted to know before her strategy could weigh in.

All night, she’d watched him stand custody over a roomful of people who managed him and aimed at him and never once saw him; something in her had gotten tired of the arrangement on his behalf.

That was the lean. Right there. She looked at it honestly, because she looked at everything honestly; it was cheaper than the alternative and her family had moved too often to ship regrets.

He was interesting the way the granite sergeant had been interesting: a man built entirely out of one old decision. But the sergeant had been her parents’ project, and she’d been fourteen and mostly invested in the woodworking.

This one — this one ate her food like a man conducting a defense, and tracked her smoke experiments across four days of braise. He stood in surf every night for a reason he’d sooner die than state and said service the way other men said a name at a graveside.

And she was thirty-one, not fourteen, and it was her own pot on the stove this time, and when he’d gone still and amber-eyed at her question she had felt the floor of her own fine, easy, unbothered life move very slightly underfoot.

The proofing cabinet clicked. She finished the wine.

“He’s interesting,” she told the empty kitchen, out loud, in the voice she used for decisions, and heard for herself how far behind the facts the decision was running. Interesting was fine. Interesting was allowed.

She rinsed the glass, banked the lights, and went to bed composing a braise she had no way of knowing was already famous two decks up, in a grey room, in the full drawer of things a careful man declined to examine.

Two weeks, she thought, drifting.

Whatever he was so certain he had to survive — she hoped, with a fierceness that surprised her, that he’d figure out nobody here was shooting.

Chapter 7

Aldric

The wall did not fail all at once.

Walls never did.

They failed like hulls: a seam, a flex, a tolerance exceeded once too often, and then all the deferred arithmetic came due in a single breath.

The seam had been opening for days. He knew the signs and logged them with grim honesty: the cuff needing adjustment more often, the last notch holding like a door held against weather with a shoulder. Part of it was the station itself — the negotiations souring, the Earth feeds pumping their low-grade fear up the Bridge with every transport, seventeen hundred beings’ unease accumulating in the corridors like humidity. A hall that had been merely loud in his first week now leaned on him.

Part of it was not the station, and he knew that too.