“Right.” A breath. “Right. Okay.”
She does not move yet. She is gathering. I let her gather.
“And — sorry — could I —”
“You can use my comm.”
“I —”
“Lorri.”
The first time I’ve said her name out loud. Her eyes come back to mine and the chin lowers a fraction and her breath catches small and I taste the shift on the air — sweeter, warmer, the compatible signal thickening — and my hands tighten on the cradle rim behind me because they want to do something else and I am not letting them.
“Use my comm,” I say. Quieter. “Tell her there was an incident. Tell her the pod’s safe and the chain is signed. Tell her we’ll sort it. We’ll sort it.”
“We’ll sort it.”
“We.”
She nods. Once. Small. And then she squares her shoulders the way she did in the doorway when I asked her if she was supposed to be here, and she walks past me toward the inner hatch — close enough that I get the full hit of her scent as she passes, close enough that my hands stay locked on the cradle rim by force of will and nothing else — and the inner hatch hisses open, and she steps through into the cargo office.
Her boots cross the deck plate and stop in front of my comm console.
The kettle clicks on in the galley.
The hold lights ease down half a notch.
HORATIO, somewhere in the ceiling, hums quietly along to a slow bass line that has no business being aboard a working cargo vessel. The cradle’s diagnostic strip pulses green, green, green. The pod sits silent and contained. Vresh, in the bay next door, is presumably composing his fifth complaint of the rotation.
My back against the cradle. Arms crossed. Watching through the inner hatch as Lorri sits down at my comm console — small in the chair, my chair — her hand hovering over the input, staring at the cursor, trying to find the words forI caused a twenty-four-hour quarantine on day one.
She’s going to find them.
I have twenty-four hours to make her mine, and I am going to use every minute.
3
It Wakes Up
Lorri
Theklaxonfinallystops.
Not the ringing in my ears. That one is going to be here for a while. But the station alarm cuts off mid-cycle, and the silence it leaves behind has views about me, and all of its views are bad. The bay doors are sealed. The magnetic clamps have engaged and the hold lights have dropped to a low amber that makes everything look like a sepia filter for bad decisions, and I am standing at Jazil Ereux’s comm console with my fingers over a message I have not yet sent to Flossie because I have forgotten, temporarily but completely, how words go in an order.
Hi Flossie. I locked down two bays. One contains a cargo hauler who has named me in a formal complaint. The other contains a stasis podand a very tall shirtless alien, and me. I will be here for twenty-four hours. Shall I update my employment status now, or would you prefer to do it in person?
The cursor blinks. The cursor is patient. The cursor has nowhere to go. Neither do I, which is the problem.
“Lorri.”
His voice comes from behind me. Low, unhurried, the voice of someone who has dealt with worse mornings than this and will not raise it for mine. Footsteps on the deck plates, slow and even. Then the soft clunk of something being set down on the console ledge beside me.
Water. A sealed station ration pouch, the foil kind with the pull tab. He’s opened it for me.
“Drink that,” he says. “The message will still be there when you’re done.”
He is standing close enough that I can feel the temperature difference between us. He runs cooler than me. I noticed it at the console when his chest was at my shoulder blade and his mouth was at my ear, and I am noticing it again now, a draft I cannot locate but also cannot stop standing in.
