Page 40 of Ward

He did not stay for the corner table.

There was one piece of business left that could not be conducted in her radius, because it had to be conducted honestly, and in her radius nothing about him was reliably his own.

The route back to the residence level ran past the agency office.

The lights were on.

Of course the lights were on — the office processed filings until the final bell, and behind the glass Re-lee’s silhouette moved radiant among her files, keeper of the day’s endings and beginnings, available to any applicant with paperwork to complete.

He slowed despite himself, and through the glass she looked up — antennae lifting, finding him in the corridor with the unerring instinct of nine hundred and forty matches — and did not wave him in.

She looked at him for a moment, pink and still and utterly unsurprised.

Then she smiled and went back to her files, and Aldric understood he had just been processed — that somewhere in her radiant apparatus his outcome had been entered, filed, and celebrated in advance, and the office would close without expecting his signature.

She had flagged the file herself, day one, at intake.

He’d watched her do it.

He had simply misread, for thirty days, which outcome she was flagging.

He did not go in.

He went up two decks, to finish it.

In his quarters, he did not sit down across from the paper. Standing was correct for verdicts; every tribunal he’d ever attended had known that much.

He picked up the instrument of refusal. Good paper, heavy stock, the seal crisp under his thumb — the ending written by a fortified man on a fortified world, in the last hour of a sentence that had just been vacated on review.

The evidence had been in for a month.

The half-second before the tray.

The signal through the surf.

A card in a drawer.

A hand on his forearm, once, light as tented card stock, from a woman who had walked his entire perimeter without firing a shot and then stood in her banked kitchen and handed the condemned faculty its acquittal: the feeling was the only part of you that tried.

Senna had never once left a note. Notes were for people who needed the credit. What she’d left — the sweet, the trella, the warmth at a barracks door, all of it walked away from blind — had been the same sentence in the same language, and he had spent eighteen years too deep in the grave to read it: you’re allowed. You were always allowed.

“I held formation,” he said to the empty room, one last time — the old plea, the defense, forty paces and a textbook execution of duty.

Then he said the other thing, the one eighteen years late, and his voice did not crack, quite.

“I should have been building a different formation.”

He fed the instrument of refusal into the recycler, seal and all, and watched the ending he’d written before he ever docked go to atoms, and stood in the grey room that held one blade kit, one armor stand, one card in a drawer — and, as of the final bell, one match, standing, unrefused, on the record of the Intergalactic Dating Agency in perpetuity.

The choice made a sound after all: a recycler cycling, a station turning, and a man breathing all the way out for the first time in eighteen years.

Tomorrow, the telling.

Tonight, he took the card out of the drawer and set it on the desk, square to the edge, one wrong name up, where the paperwork used to be.

Chapter 14

Tisha