Page 7 of Ward

Exceeded, substantially, delivered with tears in a public hall, was data. The machine had read past the walls, the gold, and eighteen years of sentencing — and put its blind, certain hand on a woman who fed people for a living.

The machine was wrong.

The machine had to be wrong, and the fact that his first fully formed thought was not a denial but a defense — she deserves better than what the database found in me — was a tactical detail he had no time to examine, because the room was watching, and he was already rising.

“No,” he said.

Re-lee’s radiance did not so much as flicker. “I’m sorry?”

“I decline the match. I reject it.” He kept his voice level, formal, loud enough to be witnessed, because witnesses were suddenly the one asset this room had in abundance and the record should be clean. “I’ll file the formal instrument with your office tonight. No disrespect is intended to any party” — he did not look at the chef; it seemed the single tactically sound decision left available to him — “but my answer is no, it was always going to be no, and I see no reason to waste thirty days of anyone’s time arriving at it.”

Somewhere in the hall, a Paxian grandfather said something his translator did not render.

Re-lee listened to all of it with her head tilted and her smile undimmed, the way one listens to a child announcing he is running away from home, and when he finished, she made a small satisfied note on her tablet as though he had confirmed a reservation.

“Wonderful,” she said. “That’s all very natural. Now. Agency policy — and this is the part I do need you to hear, because it’s binding on our end, not yours — is that no rejection can be processed inside the thirty-day window. The window exists for the match, not for the applicants.”

He blinked.

He had known that. He had known it on the transit, and in the training yard, and at his own desk squaring the paperwork — and one word, substantially, had knocked it clean out of his head.

Re-lee continued serenely, as if quoting scripture, which for her it was. “You cannot reject what you have not met. On day thirty, if you wish to file, my office processes it in five minutes and wishes you every happiness. Until then—” She produced, from her tablet folio, two slim data cards, one pink-edged, one blue, and held them out with both hands, ceremonially, one to each of them. “—Your match records. Schedules, compatibility summary, suggested conversation topics. The conversation topics are optional but they’re very good, I write them myself.”

Aldric looked at the card.

Every eye in the dining hall was on him. The record was running. And the terms — he heard them again in Falkin’s voice, the last time they had spoken of it, and in his own: the full window, honestly.

He had said the words.

Thirty days was the process, and the process was the debt, and a man of Vorjan House paid what he owed to the letter.

He took the weightless card. It settled hard in his palm.

“Wonderful,” Re-lee said again, at maximum radiance, and turned to the chef, who had watched the entire engagement with her arms loosely folded and her head very slightly tilted, wearing an expression Aldric declined to catalogue. “Chef Tisha, yours! I flagged the dietary compatibility section, you’ll love it. Oh — I’m so pleased. I’m always pleased, but I’m particularly pleased. You’ll both thank me.” She clasped the tablet back to her chest. “I’ll check in regularly!”

This was not a threat, and arrived like one anyway.

Re-lee floated out. The noise of the hall came back in stages, conspicuously casual, the way noise does when an entire room agrees to pretend it saw nothing. The dock crew bent over their game feed. The Paxians resumed the sauce.

Aldric stood beside the corner table, pink-edged card in hand, while the room absorbed the sight of station bureaucracy folding a Vorjan House guard like a napkin.

Remaining would not improve his position.

He retrieved his tray. Racked it. Walked for the door with his spine straight and the card burning in his hand like a live round —

“Hey.”

The chef’s voice. Unhurried. Carrying, without effort, the way it carried over a full service.

He should not have stopped. He stopped.

“Dinner service ends at the eighth bell,” she said, when he half-turned. She was already walking back around the pass, card tucked in her apron pocket like a receipt, entirely unruined, reaching for the next thing with both hands. “Kitchen’s dark after that. Just so you know, for your — schedule.” A beat, perfectly weighted. “Eric.”

The hall did not laugh.

The hall was far too invested to laugh.

It merely leaned, in aggregate, one degree closer.