Page 32 of Ward

“Hey,” she said.

He turned. Formal, braced, jaw set for whatever came — gratitude, which would burn him, or fuss, which would burn worse. She gave him neither.

“Are you injured?” he asked.

“No.”

“Are you all right?”

The second question caught where the first had not. She looked at her hands. Still now, because she had already paid the ninety seconds.

“They shook,” she admitted. “After. In the walk-in.”

His jaw tightened. He shifted half a step, not blocking her route, only taking the corridor into his keeping. “Then I’ll remain.”

“They already stopped.”

“I’ll remain anyway.”

She didn't say anything. She didn't offer to feed him, reassure him or make a casual joke.

Instead, she stood beside the man holding the corridor and allowed herself to be the one under guard.

“Kitchen’s sending up your tray. You missed the actual eating part of dinner, in all the —” she waved a hand “— cutlery.”

“That’s not necessary.”

“Nothing I do is necessary. We’ve covered this.” The corridor hummed.

He was watching her with the checked-instrument flatness back up and running, every wall re-manned, and she thought about a man crossing twenty meters faster than a tray could leave a hand, before thought, ahead of every defense he’d spent twenty years building — and about what it must be costing him, right now, to stand here and pretend it had been procedure.

She should let it be procedure.

The wire, the pot, no pressure on the walls.

She knew the doctrine; she’d written it.

“You know what I noticed?” she said instead, quietly, because her mouth got there before her strategy, as it always did with him. “Everybody else in that room watched the tray. You were the only one who never looked at it. Not once.” She held the amber gaze with the care she’d give a burned hand. “You didn’t move like a man doing his job, Aldric. You moved like a man who’s already lost somebody exactly once.”

The corridor went very quiet.

She didn’t elaborate. She didn’t wait, either — waiting would have made it a question, and it wasn’t a question; it had never been a question since the night he said service like a name at a graveside.

She just touched the pass-door with two fingers, said, “Tray’s outside your quarters at the ninth bell. Eat all of it, Eric,” and went back to her kitchen, blind, teaching the wire, with her heart going like the second Georgia’s screen door in a storm.

Chapter 11

Aldric

The after-action report took him four attempts, which was three more than any report had required of him in a decade.

The facts were not in dispute. He wrote them cold: at approximately the seventh bell, a Bridge contractor initiated a physical assault against station catering staff; the subject was restrained without injury pending security’s arrival; statements were given; the subject was removed to holding and would ship Earth-side on the next rotation, contract voided. Clean. Proportionate. Every review would clear him. The recordings showed a textbook restraint — no strike thrown, no harm done, a tray set down without one plate ringing.

The recordings also showed a Vorjan House guard crossing twenty meters of crowded hall in the time a man took to load his shoulder, and that was the line item Aldric could not write around, because he had reviewed the footage himself, twice, with the cold eye he turned on any soldier’s lapse.

He had moved before the tray.

Not with it — before it, a full half-second before, on nothing.