Page 5 of Ward

“I regret every one.” But the corner of Brooklyn’s mouth gave her away, and she finished the bowl, and left the freight question she’d allegedly come with sitting unasked on the counter, the way she always did.

Tisha watched her go and thought, not for the first time, about the chain of it — Jenny, who’d sat at that same counter end talking genetics over soup until the day she’d videoed from a purple planet with a cat in frame; then Brooklyn, inherited from Jenny like a well-loved pan; now the station filling up with tall blue-grey warriors one match at a time, like the galaxy had found her hall on a map and marked it as a good place to send the hungry ones.

She’d met Jenny’s Karuk exactly once, in the café, back when everything with the false orders was still knotted and half the station was scared of him. She’d given him a cinnamon roll on the house. He’d stared at it like an ambush and then eaten it in four bites, and Jenny had laughed until she cried, and Tisha had gone back to the counter thinking what she still thought, three years and forty species later: scary or not, hungry was hungry, and her kitchen fed them.

The new Dalgurian came in at the seventh bell, and he ate like it was a fistfight he intended to win.

She noticed him the way she noticed everyone — exits, friendlies, kid alone — and he pattern-matched instantly to the third category, which was funny, because he was roughly the size of a cargo door. Corner table, back to the wall, sightlines on both entrances. Guard posture even at rest. Pale blue-grey skin a shade deeper than Falkin’s, white hair, and when he glanced up once to track a server crossing behind him, eyes a shocking warm amber that were doing absolutely nothing warm whatsoever.

New security for the delegation, then; there’d been a bulletin. He had the gold markings — a good scatter of them, more than Falkin, climbing the side of his neck like something written in a language she couldn’t read — and he had a tray of her food, and he was eating it with the flat mechanical rhythm of a man shoveling coal into an engine.

Except.

Tisha leaned on the pass and watched, because reading tables was her actual job, whatever the contracts said.

He’d eaten the braise first, fast, fuel-like, fine. But then he’d hit the charred roots, and there had been a pause. A tiny one. A recalibration, like a man stepping onto a deck he’d been told was stable and finding it moving underneath him.

He’d looked at the roots for one full second. Then he’d kept eating at the same pace as before, like he was matching a metronome only he could hear, and saved the flatbread for last. He ate it slowly, in small deliberate portions, with the studied indifference of a man who had definitely noticed it was the best thing on the tray and would sooner be thrown out an air lock than admit it.

He was doing an excellent job not enjoying her food. Top-tier work. If she hadn’t spent thirty-one years watching people eat, she might even have bought it.

“What,” said Renn, following her sightline with two of his eyes.

“Corner table. The new Dalgurian.”

“The scary one.”

“He’s not scary, he’s furious at a flatbread.” She watched the guard leave the last bite as proof of indifference — the discipline of it, she could have applauded — then rise and clear his tray with military economy. “Renn. Look at that. He left one bite.”

“So he didn’t like it.”

“He left one bite on purpose.” She was grinning now; she could feel it. “That’s not ‘didn’t like it.’ That’s a hostage.”

The Dalgurian racked his tray and walked out of her dining hall without a glance at anyone, spine straight as a service corridor, and the room’s noise closed behind him like water.

Tisha pushed off the pass and went back to her manifests, still grinning, already composing tomorrow’s braise in the back of her mind — a little more smoke, maybe, see what that did to the metronome.

Kid eating alone, she thought. Biggest one I’ve ever had.

She’d fed harder cases than him, on four continents, out of a kitchen box that always got unpacked first. However long the delegation kept him here, he had to eat, and there was exactly one kitchen on this station worth eating from, and it was hers.

“Put more of the charred roots on tomorrow’s line,” she told Renn, cheerfully. “We’ve got a regular.”

Chapter 3

Aldric

By the sixth day, Aldric had the station mapped the way he mapped any posting: by threat, by asset, by routine.

Threats: the docking manifests, still a sieve; the negotiation venue, coverage improved to three approaches after his memorandum; the Earth-side feeds, which had begun running a man named Hargrove at regular intervals the way one runs a fever.

Assets: Falkin, when he could be pried out of domestic contentment; station security, willing if thin; the delegation’s standing with the counsel, intact but tiring.

Routines: his own, built in six days and already fixed. Training at first bell. Security review at third. Reports until seventh.

Dinner at the seventh bell, at the corner table.

That was all it was.