And then the conversation goes somewhere I don’t expect.
“Why SNAG?” he asks. “Instead of OOPS. Instead of something — safer.”
I look at my tea. The answer to this question is the answer to a lot of questions, and most of them are questions I have never answered out loud because the answer is the shape of me and the shape of me is something I have spent my whole life apologizing for.
“Because Flossie’s job posting saidwe find what’s lost.And I —” I stop. Start again. “On Vestari. Growing up. I was the youngest. Three brothers, all older, all — useful. Colony-useful. Strong arms, steady hands, good in a drill. They left when they were old enough. One byone. Routes, stations, better gravity. I don’t blame them. Everyone leaves the colony if they can.”
My tea is fascinating. My tea is the most important object in the galaxy. I am going to look at my tea and not at his face because if I look at his face I will see pity and I cannot do this with pity.
“When my brothers left, it was just me and my mother. And the colony kids.” I wrap my hands around the mug. “I was — I am — clumsy. Not charmingly clumsy. Notoh she dropped a thing, how sweet.The kind where you walk into a room and the room gets worse. I knocked things over. Broke equipment. Said the wrong thing at the wrong time. Tripped during drills. My hands didn’t do what I told them to do, and my feet didn’t go where I put them, and my mouth said sorry. All the time. For the knocking and the breaking and the tripping and eventually just for being there. For taking up space.”
The galley is quiet. HORATIO is muted. The hum of the ship fills the silence as if something were holding its breath.
“Colony kids figure out who’s useful fast. Who fixes things, who carries things, who you want on your drill team and who you don’t. I was the don’t.” A breath. “The names. Clumsy. Stupid.In the way.They said it until it stopped being a thing they were calling me and started being a thing I called myself.”
I am telling a male I met today about the thing I do not tell people. The words are coming out and I am not sure I want to stop them because something about the way he listens — the stillness, the attention, the way he has not moved or interrupted or tried to fix it — is making it safe to say.
“Once it got physical. A group of them. I’d broken something in the prep hall, some piece of drill equipment. They waited until the adults were in the lower levels, and they cornered me in the access corridor,and they —” My voice goes flat. Small. The voice of a girl who learned to take up less space. “It was enough. It was enough to teach me that taking up space had a cost, and the cost was going to be collected.”
I set the mug down because my hands are shaking.
“So I learned to hide. That became my thing. The one thing I had that nobody else had. I learned to fold myself into the smallest shape I could make. Under things. Behind things. Inside things. I got so good at it that during evacuation drills I was always the last one found. The drill officers would do full sweeps — ventilation ducts, maintenance crawls, cargo tarps — and I’d be somewhere they hadn’t thought to look because I had been practicing not being found since I was nine years old.”
I look up. I have to look up.
He is not pitying me.
He is sitting very still with his hands flat on the table and his ridges have gone dark — not the warm bronze of attraction, not the middle shade of interest — dark. The dark from the fight. The dark from standing between me and the Vrennak. His jaw is locked so tight I can see the muscles working. His pupils have contracted to slits. His claws — the ones I saw for the first time today, the dark, curved ones — have extended. Just the tips. Pressing into the surface of the table. He doesn’t seem to notice.
It is not pity. It is not sympathy.
It is fury.
Quiet, controlled, barely contained fury on behalf of a girl who learned to fold herself into the smallest version of herself because the world punished her for being the size she actually was. I think — looking at the claw marks appearing in his own table — that if thepeople who did it were in this room, they would not leave it the same way they came in.
“Jazil,” I say. Soft. “It was a long time ago.”
His jaw works. The claws retract. Slowly. Like he has to think about it.
“Names,” he says. His voice is low and wrong in a way that I have not heard from him before. The business voice with something underneath it that is not operational. “The ones who cornered you. Do you remember their names?”
It’s a question that’s shaped like something else.
“It was twenty-one years ago.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“Jazil.”
He closes his eyes. Takes a breath. When he opens them the slits have eased back to something wider and the ridges have gone from black to dark bronze and the claw marks in the table are the only evidence that something just happened inside him I do not fully understand but that I felt — felt the way you feel a change in gravity, in the weight of a room rearranging itself around a person who has made a decision.
“I know,” he says. Quiet. “I know it was a long time ago.”
He says nothing else. He doesn’t need to. The claw marks say it. The ridges say it. And I have a feeling — a deep, stomach-dropping, thrilling feeling — that the colony kids who taught me to hide would not enjoy being in a room with Jazil Ereux.
Not today. Not ever.
“The point is,” I say, and my voice has found itself again, steadier now, warmer, “I am very good at hiding. The best. Professional-grade.If you ever need someone to disappear into a maintenance duct on short notice, I am your girl.”
