Page 4 of Ward

Home.

Growing up, home had been a duffel bag. Eleven schools. Her dad’s postings ran eighteen months on average, and her mother packed the kitchen box last and unpacked it first, every single time, because — she’d said it while wrapping the good skillet in a bath towel in three different hemispheres — walls change, honey. Dinner doesn’t.

By fifteen, Tisha could make her mother’s red stew on any heat source on Earth including one memorable camp stove in a typhoon, and it tasted like every house they’d ever lived in, because it was every house they’d ever lived in. That was the trick of her life: you couldn’t keep the walls. You could absolutely keep the stew.

They had been good houses, all of them, even the ugly ones. Her parents could make issued quarters feel inhabited before sunset: beds made, skillet out, somebody arguing over music while the stew started. Tisha had never doubted she was loved. She had only learned, very young, that love and leaving could occupy the same room without canceling each other, and that orders always got the final word. Libra Station was the first permanent address she had chosen for herself.

So when people asked her — and they did, constantly, with big concerned eyes — whether it wasn’t hard living on a station, so far from everything, she never knew how to explain that a spinning ring full of hungry strangers from forty worlds was the most permanent address she’d ever had. Three years now. The pantry was hers. The battered cast-iron she’d hauled up the Bridge personally, in her lap, like a baby, was hers. The eighth bell was hers.

Nobody was going to hand her father new orders and make her pack it all in a box.

“Ticket says the contractor table wants ‘normal food,’” Renn said, reading. “Quote marks theirs.”

“Everything I make is normal food. Normalcy is regional.” But she pulled the burger plates herself and carried them over, because the Bridge crews tipped their gratitude in gossip from downstairs and because feeding people who arrived a little bit hostile was, frankly, her favorite event. Nobody stayed hostile through a proper burger. She’d run the experiment for years.

One of them — big guy, sunburned neck, the kind of tired that made men mean — looked from his plate to the Charro sharing their dessert two tables down, and something crossed his face that she catalogued and didn’t like. But he ate. They all ate. By the end of it the sunburned one even said thanks, mostly to the plate.

Progress. She counted everything as progress. It drove certain people crazy, which was also progress.

The afternoon lull hit at the sixth bell, that golden slack tide when service dropped to stragglers and the kitchen exhaled. Tisha claimed her corner of the prep counter, coffee in one hand, and went through tomorrow’s manifests while Dot muttered at her sourdough starter like it owed her money.

“Freight’s short on greens again,” Tisha said. “I’m trading the Andovi grower two loaves for a crate. Don’t tell logistics, it upsets them when the economy works.”

“Mm,” said Dot, to the starter.

“Also the agency sent another form.” She flicked it up on her tablet — pink-edged, radiating administrative joy.

INTERGALACTIC DATING AGENCY:

PROFILE CONFIRMATION.

“I forgot I was even in that database, honestly. I signed up in — when did the second cohort thing open? Two years ago? Marnie from hydro was doing it and it was her birthday and the form was fun. It had a section about what smells mean comfort to you. Nobody’s ever asked me that on a date. I put ‘onions in butter’ and meant it.”

“You signed up for an alien dating agency because a form was fun,” Dot said.

“The form was very fun. And it’s not like anything came of it. It’s a database. I’m in lots of databases.” She stamped her approval on the produce order. “The emergency contact one. The allergy registry. This one just has better stationery.”

“Mm,” Dot said again, in the tone of a woman who had been married three times and considered all databases suspect.

Tisha confirmed her profile was current — it took one tap; her life did not change often, that was the point of it — and went back to the manifests, humming. Out in the hall, the stragglers straggled. The station turned. Somewhere below, Earth was having its afternoon, and its problems, and its increasingly loud opinions about places like this one, and she felt about that the way she felt about weather over an airfield: real, worth watching, and not something you let into the kitchen.

Brooklyn came through on the tail of the lull, which was Brooklyn’s way — arriving at food sideways, at off-hours, like eating was an errand she could be talked out of.

Tisha had her plate moving before the woman reached the pass. That was their arrangement, three years old now, never once negotiated aloud: Brooklyn pretended she’d come to drop off a freight question, and Tisha pretended the plate had already been made by accident, and Brooklyn sat at the near end of the counter and ate all of it while pretending to read her tablet, and everybody’s dignity survived.

“Your cold-chain request went through,” Brooklyn said, sitting. “Also I’m not hungry.”

“Course not.” Tisha set down the bowl. “Eat the accident.”

Brooklyn ate the accident. She looked better than she had in the spring — the blue-haired guard had taken the grey out from under her eyes and put something steadier in its place. Still, she still ate like a woman who’d spent thirty years treating meals as an interruption, and Tisha still considered her a career-length project, and they were both comfortable with the assignment.

“Hall’s going to get louder,” Brooklyn said, between bites. “Delegation’s expanding for the next negotiation phase. Security detail came in today — another Vorjan House guard. Falkin’s year-mate. You’ll know him when you see him; he’ll be the one radiating cheerful menace at a corner table.”

“Which corner?”

“Whichever one has the sightlines. They’re all like that.” Brooklyn’s mouth did the small thing it did when she was deciding how much to say. “This one more than most, per Falkin. Fair warning for your staff: he’s not chatty.”

“Neither were you,” Tisha said, refilling her water unasked. “Look at us now. Whole sentences.”