Her expression shifts. The thing that was not a smile becomes something else. Something that has been waiting behind her professional face for a long time. Something that looks like a woman who has been quietly watching a male she considers family pretend to be fine for a decade and who has just seen the pretending stop.
“Get some sleep,” she says. Soft. “You look like you need it.”
She cuts the channel. The screen goes dark.
I sit in the cockpit for ten seconds. Then I stand up and walk back to the cabin where she is sleeping in my sheets.
11
This Isn't Your Place
Lorri
Thelockdownclearsatoh-six-hundred and the bay doors open and Junction One hits me in the face like a dock announcement from God.
Noise. Light. People. The concourse recyc running at full capacity and the overhead strips buzzing at a frequency that was not audible twenty-four hours ago but is now audible because I have spent twelve hours on a sealed ship with ambient HORATIO and the soft hum of a male breathing against the back of my neck and my auditory calibration has SHIFTED, and I am not readyfor this.
I am not ready for any of this. I am standing at the Bay 14 threshold with a hover-cart and a sealed pod and a dock officer who is being very professional about the fact that I look like I have been through a dock compactor. Gauze on my temple. Bruise on my hip that I am pretending doesn’t hurt when I walk and that is hurting when I walk. A utility jacket held together by its buckles because the front zipper has been slit from collar to hem by a claw, which is a sentence I never expected to think and am now thinking on a public concourse. And underneath the jacket, a shirt. His shirt. Four sizes too large. Soft. Smelling like river stones and clean mineral skin and the specific scent of a male who held me against his chest and saidstaywhen he thought I was sleeping.
I was not sleeping.
The pod is on the hover-cart. Re-sealed with the remains of the Vrennak inside. Intact…mostly. The casing is scratched from the fight — long claw marks across the housing, a dent where the Vrennak hit the cradle on the first pass. Underneath the scratches, stamped into the metal at the base of the housing, a geometric mark: two hexagons, interlocking, offset by a half-rotation, sharing a single edge. Corporate. Clean. The logo you’d see on medical equipment or in a vitamin catalog. I don’t recognize it. I add it to the list of things to tell Flossie.
The lucky top is in a courier bag on the hover-cart. Folded carefully. Sauce-stained. Claw-slit. Destroyed. My mother said to wear it on every first day —every single first day, baby— and this morning I am walking into the most important conversation of my life without it. The lucky top is in a bag, and I am wearing a Skiveth courier’s shirt, and I do not have my armor, and I am going to have to do this one without it.
The thought fires every alarm I own. The concourse is right there, full of people with functioning wardrobes and intact dignity, and I am about to walk through it in a claw-slit jacket and a shirt that belongs to a male I met yesterday, and EVERYONE IS GOING TO KNOW. Everyone is going to look at me and know that something happened in Bay 14, and the something is written all over me in gauze and borrowed fabric and the specific expression of a woman who has been — STOP. Stop. Not everyone. Nobody is looking at you, Lorri. Nobody on this concourse cares about your jacket situation. You are not the main character of the concourse.
The old reflex says apologize. To the concourse, to the dock officer, to the hover-cart, probably, for making it carry a pod that nearly killed me. The reflex is a muscle I have been exercising for twenty-one years, and it is very strong, and it is telling me that the correct response to this situation is to say sorry to a series of inanimate objects until someone takes pity on me.
I do not apologize. I grip the hover-cart handle and walk.
It does not scare me as much as it should.
“Ms. Vance.” HORATIO, from the Bay 14 hatch speaker. “It has been a genuine delight. Please do come back. I will have the galley ready. Two settings.”
Behind HORATIO, in the hatchway, Jazil. Watching me go. I do not look back. If I look back I will not leave, and I have a pod to deliver and a conversation to survive and the looking back will end me.
I push the hover-cart toward the concourse. His shirt moves against my skin with every step. The collar brushes my neck. The fabric is soft in a way that suggests HORATIO has opinions about laundry detergent and has been implementing them for nine years.
Don’t think about the shirt. Don’t think about what’s under the shirt. Don’t think about the bite mark on your collarbone that you checked in the head mirror this morning and that is DEFINITELY visible above the neckline and that you are going to have to explain to Flossie or, worse, not explain to Flossie, which will be worse because Flossie will know and Flossie will not ask and the not-asking will be DEVASTATING.
I push the cart. The pod rolls. The concourse is loud and bright and full of people who have not spent the last twelve hours being hunted through a dark ship by a male who can taste them in the air.
My life is very strange right now.
SNAG smells like bergamot. The fairy lights are on. The kettle is hot. Everything is exactly the way it was yesterday morning when I walked in with shaking hands and a lucky top and a need to prove I belonged and the bergamot is the same and the fairy lights are the same and the butter-colored cardigan is the same and I am not. I am not the same person who walked in here twenty-four hours ago, and the not-same-ness is so obvious that Flossie sees it before I’ve finished pushing the hover-cart through the door.
Her eyes go to the pod first. Sealed. Delivered. Done.
Then her eyes go to me. The gauze, the bruises, the jacket held together by buckles. The shirt underneath that is not mine and not my size and is, unmistakably, a male’s.
She does not comment on the shirt. Flossie will never comment on the shirt. Flossie is going to note the shirt in the same quiet, comprehensive way she notes everything she sees — the reading of people shehas been doing for longer than I have been alive — and the shirt will live in that reading forever and Flossie will never say a word about it and the not-saying will communicate more than any word could.
“Sit down, sweetheart.”
I sit. She pours tea. The mug is warm in my hands and for a second the warmth is his hands and my throat closes, and I hold the mug tighter and the mug does not have an opinion about this because the mug is a mug and I need to stop giving objects opinions except that the mug is WARM and his hands were COOL and the temperature difference is —
NOT NOW.
