Page 28 of Ward

He noted, in the flat honest register, that habit was doing most of the holding now.

He noted, further, that some traitorous quartermaster deep in his own ranks had already begun issuing supplies for the other side of the argument — had catalogued the location of her quarters, the hour her shift ended, the sound of her laugh across a crowded hall at the seventh bell — and that no inventory he conducted could find where the requisitions were coming from.

He went back to the desk instead, to stand the night watch over a piece of paper.

The silence had changed again. All month it had been going strange on him — the reward of his days gone flavorless, nothing where quiet used to be — and now, with the smell of her kitchen dissipating into the recyclers and the warmth of the meal in him, the silence finished its slow treachery and revealed what it had become.

Empty. Not calm — empty. A held perimeter with nothing inside it.

He looked around the room the way she would see it, and the exercise was a mistake, and he could not stop conducting it. Grey walls. One chair. A blade kit and an armor stand and not one object in twenty years of service that a living soul had chosen for him, except — as of tonight — a plate.

Senna would have —

The seal flexed. He let it, one degree, because he was tired, and because the room was already breached, and one degree was this: she used to leave things. That was all. Small things, at the barracks door, in his kit, wrapped in cloth — a festival sweet, a sprig of trella because he’d said once that the smell reached him even through the cuff. Never a note. Notes were for people who needed the credit.

She’d leave the thing and walk away blind and he would find it after a shift with his walls worn to nothing, and it had felt — his instruments had been screaming it since the corridor — like a plate set square to a door with one teasing word on a card.

Eighteen years since anyone had done that.

Eighteen years since he’d concluded, before a tribunal that cleared him and a grave that didn’t, that a man whose feeling had failed at the one moment feeling was owed had no business being felt for, ever again, by anyone.

The walls weren’t grief.

He’d told Falkin that once, in the only conversation they’d ever had about it, and it was the one lie he’d ever told the man.

The walls were sentencing. Self-imposed, self-administered, eighteen years without parole, and the sentence had held through postings and tribunals and wars and Falkin’s entire radiant campaign of friendship —

— and was being dismantled, stone by stone, by a station cook armed with marrow bones and card stock.

He should sign the instrument.

It was right there. The pen was right there.

Five days of tomorrow left in the window, and here, tonight, was the clearest possible evidence of the breach in progress, the case for the wall stated in smoke and bread: this is what gets in, guard.

This is how it starts.

Sign, file on day thirty, redeploy home to the grey where nothing reaches you, and let her spend her warmth on the room that can hold it — she had a whole hall of them, a whole station, forty species at the seventh bell; she would not miss one corner table.

The math was merciful. He’d run it five nights straight.

He looked at the pen. He looked at the empty plate.

Then he got up, and washed the plate in his tiny grey basin with the care he gave a blade after action, and dried it, and did not set it by the door for return.

He set it on the desk.

Squared to the edge.

Beside the unsigned instrument, so that the two of them could go on facing each other overnight — the ending he’d written before he ever docked, and the evening, warm and emptied and unanswerable, that had just eaten its margin to nothing.

I’ll return it tomorrow, he told himself, standing between them, and knew exactly what the sentence was worth.

He kept the card.

Chapter 10

Tisha