Ten seconds to look at her. To memorise how she sleeps, curled tight, small, her body doing the thing it does when she's not awake to manage it, making itself compact, taking up as little space as possible, and even in sleep I can see the girl who counted bus fare and ate standing up and I want to fill every inch of space around her until she stops making herself small.
The screen.
Mila.
Need to meet. Gallery. Found something on the package. Come now.
The package. Our word for the witness file. Three years of dead ends and manifests and cold trails, and Mila has found something at four in the morning and wants to meet in the gallery and Star is asleep on my balcony in my shirt and my body is still humming with the memory of her mouth on my scars.
Clean shirt. A note on the hotel pad:Gone to gallery. Back before you wake. Coffee is in the machine. Black, one sugar. —A.
I cover her with a second blanket because the night air is cooling and her feet are bare. I don't kiss her because I'll wake her and she needs sleep more than I need to touch her.
The suite door closes behind me. The corridor is empty.
Somewhere below, in the Tranquil Antique Gallery, Mila is waiting with information I've been chasing for three years.
I take the stairs. Two at a time.
Star
THE BALCONY IS EMPTYwhen I wake up.
Grey light. Early morning, the Mediterranean stretching to the horizon, the sky barely separating from the water. I'm still in his chair, still wrapped in blankets (two blankets, he covered me twice, and that detail hits me in the chest and sits there like a warm stone), still wearing his shirt buttoned wrong.
The note is on the side table, weighed down by a coffee mug.
Gone to gallery. Back before you wake. Coffee is in the machine. Black, one sugar. —A.
He got the coffee order right. I hold the note for a second, pressing my thumb over the A, the single initial, the letter that contains his whole name and everything that name means to me now. Then I fold it and put it in the shirt pocket. His shirt. His pocket. Mine.
Planner entry: morning. Location: his balcony. Status: wearing his shirt, holding his note, drinking his coffee, having his feelings. Prognosis: terminal.
I make the coffee. I drink it standing on the balcony, bare feet on the deck, the morning air cool on my legs. The ship is docked, I think. The engines are lower than usual, the sixty-two hertz dropped to something softer, and through the railing I can see the pale edge of a port town.
He'll be back soon. Mila found something on the witness file, and he'll come through the door with whatever the informationgave him and I'll be here, in his shirt, with coffee, and we'll figure out the next part together. That's how it works now. Together.
I rinse the mug. Find my uniform in the sitting room, crumpled where it fell last night. I change. I button the tunic correctly this time, which takes three attempts because my hands keep pausing on the buttons to remember his hands unbuttoning them and that memory is NOT HELPFUL right now, brain, file it under "later," priority: low, status: definitely not low.
I fold his shirt. Leave it on the back of the chair.
Then I go to find him.
THE GALLERY IS DIM. Same warm spotlights, same shadows. I haven't been here after hours since the night of the Mayflower handkerchief, when his hands found mine over four-hundred-year-old lace and he kissed me against the display case and I tasted coffee and salt and the rest of my life began.
The glass door is unlocked. I push through.
Artem is at the far end, at the working table Mila uses for the manifests. He's standing, not sitting. His hands pressed to the table surface, his shoulders rigid, and he doesn't turn when I come in.
"Good morning," I offer, and my voice sounds like a girl who woke up in a man's shirt on a balcony with two blankets and a love note, which is what I am, which is what I was three seconds ago, and I'm already crossing the gallery toward him with a smile on my face when he turns his head and the spotlights catch his expression and my feet stop.
His face is dark. Beyond the cold distance of the reassignment. Beyond the guarded blankness of the corridor. Something worse. Something I've never seen. And even though it's not aimed at me (I can't tell yet, I can't read it yet, all I can see is the rigid line of his jaw and the burning in his eyes), my body reacts before my brain does, a full-body flinch, because the last time his face changed without warning I spent two weeks eating bread rolls standing up and putting cedarwood at the back of a shelf.
Not again. Please not again.
"Artem?" My voice comes out thin. Small. The voice of a girl whose planner just crashed for the second time in a month.
He picks something up from the table. Papers. Printouts. Holds them toward me, and I take them because my hands work when the rest of me doesn't, and the printouts are dense, columns of data, timestamps, routing codes, and the fragments swim in front of my eyes:placement confirmed,Cerulean schedule received,therapist cover secured,Almazov access established.
