“He’d have to get through me first.”
It comes out before my brain has issued any opinions on whether my mouth should say that, and it lands in the warm air of the hold without my permission, and her hands lower from her face, slowly, and she looks at me over her fingertips with eyes that have gone very wide and silent.
I hold the gaze. I do not back off it. My ridges are dark. I can feel them. I don’t care.
“Right,” she says eventually. Small. “Right. Yes. Well. Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it.”
* * *
I push off the cradle. Slow. Deliberate. The way I move when the situation has changed, and I want her to feel the ground reorganizing under her boots without me telling her about it.
“Twenty-four hours,” I say.
“Twenty-four hours.”
“Sealed bay. Sealed neighbor. No comms in or out except priority channels.”
“Twenty-four —”
“Hours.”
“That’s excessive.”
“It is.”
“That is wildly excessive.”
“It is.”
“For a false positive?”
“For a false positive,” HORATIO confirms gravely. “The protocol does not, regrettably, distinguish between false positives and real ones until the full diagnostic window has elapsed. The diagnostic window is twenty-four hours long. The diagnostic window has been twenty-four hours since the protocol was drafted in 4271. Severalappeals have been made over the years. None have succeeded. Junction Authority is, as you have perhaps gathered, thorough.”
“Twenty-four —”
“Hours,” HORATIO repeats, with the delight of someone who has already used the word three times and intends to use it three more.
She is staring at me. Her hands have come down all the way now. The flush is back across her cheeks, hectic and high, and her chin has come up by some defensive instinct that has nothing to do with the situation and everything to do with not knowing what else to do with her face.
I am, somewhere in the center of my chest, delighted.
I should not be feeling this way. A twenty-four-hour quarantine costs me my undock window, my next three handoffs, a client on Morcrest who does not communicate displeasure with grace, and a route schedule that will take me a week to rebuild. By any rational accounting, I should be furious.
I am delighted.
I am not furious. My ridges are broadcasting it to anyone who knows how to read them, and she doesn’t know how to read them, and I have twenty-four hours sealed in a cargo bay with her to find out what happens when the naming catches up.
She is small and curvy and flushed, and she has detonated my morning at speed, and she has not stopped looking at me even now, and there is more to this female than the panel-pressing and the Vresh-misreading and the interview that landed her on my ramp, and I have twenty-four hours sealed in a cargo bay with her to find out what.
I tip my head toward the inner hatch.
“Comm console’s through there. You’ll want to message Flossie before someone else does.”
She blinks. “I — yes. Yes, I should —”
“Station priority line. Quarantine traffic gets through. She’ll have it inside two minutes.”
