The transport hummed through the afternoon streets of Trevort and Coreni sat in it and let herself, carefully and in private, begin to grieve the version of her life she had believed in until this afternoon.
She was still looking at the window when she felt the seat beside her take his weight.
He had moved across without announcement, without asking, without any of the careful professional preamble she had come to expect from him when he was about to do something that crossed a line he'd been observing. He simply sat down next to her, close enough that his arm was against hers, and looked at the city going past the same window she was looking at.
She didn't say anything.
He didn't say anything.
After a moment his hand came to rest over hers where it lay in her lap — not gripping, not demanding anything. Just the weight of it. Warm and still and present.
She looked down at it. His hand over hers. The size of the difference between them, which she had catalogued as tactical information since the dock and was now cataloguing as something else entirely.
She didn't move her hand.
The transport hummed through the afternoon streets of Trevort and she sat in it and thought about a list with five names on it and a question mark that had been sitting in an envelope behind a filing cabinet for thirty years, waiting for someone to find it. She thought about her father's handwriting. She thought about more data needed, always more data, and understood now what data he had been gathering and why he had never been able to tell her he had it.
It was a lot. It was, she thought, possibly too much for one afternoon, and she had been holding it upright through professional habit and the specific discipline of not falling apart in public, and the transport was not exactly public, and he was not exactly professional anymore — not right now, not with his hand over hers and the city going past and nobody watching.
She let out a breath she had been holding since the archive.
She turned her head and rested it against his shoulder.
He went still for a moment — not the professional stillness, the other kind, the kind that meant something was happening that he hadn't prepared for. Then something in him settled, and she felt it through the point of contact between them, and his thumb moved once across the back of her hand.
She closed her eyes.
She let the transport carry them. She let herself, carefully and in private, begin to grieve the version of her life she had believed in until this afternoon. She let the solid, unhurried fact of him beside her be what it was, which was the most comforting thing in the world and also a complication she didn't have the space to examine right now.
Later. She had a whole filing system for later.
For now she kept her eyes closed and her head on his shoulder and let the city go past, and he kept his hand over hers and his shoulder exactly where it was and said nothing, because he understood — he had always understood, she was realizing — that there were things that didn't need words and that this was one of them.
Chapter Eleven
Coreni
Her father's apartment smelled the way it always had — old paper, cold caffe, the particular mineral sharpness of the compounds he kept in glass vials on every available surface. He was a man who worked where he lived and lived where he worked, and the two had long since stopped being distinguishable.
Coreni stood in the doorway for a moment before he heard her, taking inventory the way she always did when she arrived somewhere — the stack of new data pads on the desk, the half-eaten meal pushed to one side, the screen still running a simulation she recognized as protein interaction modeling. He'd been working. He was always working. She had grown up understanding that the work was not something separate from him, the way other children's parents had hobbies or evenings. The work was what he was made of.
She understood that differently now.
"Little one." He turned from the screen and his face did the thing it always did when he saw her — opened, briefly, into something uncalculated before he remembered himself. He was a careful man. He had always been a careful man. She was only now understanding the cost of that.
"Hi Dad."
He crossed the room and put his arms around her and she let herself be held for a moment longer than usual, because she didn't know how many of these were left on the other side of what she was about to do.
"You look tired," he said, pulling back to look at her face.
"I've been working."
"A story?"
"Yes."
He searched her face with the particular attention of someone who had been reading her expressions since she was an infant and knew most of their vocabulary. Whatever he found there, he didn't name it. He just nodded and moved toward the small kitchen, which meant he was going to feed her, which was what he always did when something was wrong and he didn't know how to say so.
