Twenty minutes pass like that. Him on the crate beside me, watching the pod. Me on the crate beside him, watching him watch it and pretending I’m not.
He smells of something clean and mineral, like river stones in the sun, and the scent has layers; I keep finding more of every time I breathe. I am breathing a lot. I am breathing on purpose now, which is not how breathing is supposed to work.
His forearm is resting on his thigh. The ridges along the outer edge are dark and raised and three inches from where our knees touch, and my hand has drifted. My hand is drifting toward the ridges with the slow, determined inevitability of a shopping cart with one bad wheel, and I catch it and curl my fingers into my palm.
Who does that? Who changes a containment pod to keep a predator unconscious indefinitely? What do you need a sleeping predator for? Why would you—
“Experiments,” I say. Out loud. I didn’t mean to say it out loud.
Jazil looks at me. The blue eyes are sharp and his expression has changed again, something that isn’t surprise but is in the neighborhood of surprise, the look of someone who has been thinking the same thing and is recalibrating because the person next to him got there too.
“Maybe,” he says.
“The modified containment. The nonstandard power. The ghost ship with no manifest. Someone was keeping it.”
“That’s SNAG’s call. Not mine.”
“But you think so.”
A beat. The corner of his mouth shifts. Not the almost-smile. Something else. Something that might be respect, if respect were a thing you could see in the corner of a Skiveth male’s mouth at three feet.
“Yeah,” he says. “I think so.”
Something flickers at the corner of his mouth. Quick, there and gone. His tongue. Forked. The tips of it tasting the air between us for a fraction of a second. I don’t know what that means. I know nothing about Skiveth biology. But I know what it looks like when someone’s body is paying attention without permission, because mine is doing the same thing.
He catches me staring. His eyes meet mine. Blue, slit-pupiled, steady. The pupils have done something — widened, shifted — that changes the quality of the light the way turning up a lamp changes a room. I don’t look away. He doesn’t look away. Four seconds of mutual eye contact pass, and four seconds is not a long time unless you are spending it on a cargo crate with a shirtless Skiveth courier whose tongue just tasted the air between you, in which case four seconds is approximately a year.
The hold hums. The pod pulses green. Stable. Contained. Six years of someone’s work, sitting in a cradle on the deck plate of an OOPS courier ship, waiting for SNAG to open the box and ask the question.
I am going to have to meet the people who did this. If SNAG takes this case, if Flossie opens it, someone will have to go looking for whoever changed that pod and sealed a living predator inside it and left it on a dead ship in open space. That’s the job. That’s my job. That is the job I was too nervous to ask about in the interview and too excited to say no to when Flossie gave me the datapad.
“Captain,” HORATIO says. “I am detecting a marginal shift in ambient air composition. Shall I increase the ventilation?”
“No.”
“Understood. I will not speculate on the source. I am simply noting it. For the record.”
The AI is monitoring the air between us and has detected a shift in the air between us. The AI is keeping a RECORD.
Jazil’s jaw tightens. The almost-smile is back, suppressed, and that the pod and the ghost ship and the six-year stasis and the wrongness of all of it are sitting twenty feet away and he is still, despite everything, almost smiling at me —
“You’re staring at my ridges,” he says.
“I’m not.”
“You’ve been staring at my ridges for three minutes.”
“That is — that is a wild exaggeration, and I was looking at the crate.”
“The crate is below my arm.”
“It’s an interesting crate.”
The almost-smile commits. Halfway, arriving in stages, and the effect on his face is unreasonable. His cheekbones catch the amber light differently when he smiles. The elongated bones along his jaw softened by a degree. He looks, for one unguarded second, like someone who is enjoying himself, and the enjoyment is because of me, and I am going to need to think about something else immediately.
“Please don’t make me laugh,” I say. “I’m trying to have a crisis.”
“Far be it from me.”
