She looked at me for a second too long like she could see under my surface. Then she let it go, which is the kindest thing anybody can do for me, and told me to go find a husband.
Maisie hit me at a dead run.
I've known her since we were nine, and the Maisie I grew up with took up all the room she wanted. Then four years with that smooth-voiced reptile James crumpled her up like a dirty napkin, made her smaller in every way that didn't show on a measuring tape. She used to flinch when people moved too fast. She used to apologize to furniture.
The woman who slammed into me outside the Agency office did not apologize to anyone. She wrapped both arms around my ribs and squeezed like she meant to crack one, warm and solid andglowing, actually faintly glowing, probably from all the star-figs she ate out at the orchard. She smelled like wood smoke and cider now; the orchard worked all the way into her, a whole year of Ceres-9 where Earth used to be.
"You went in without me," she said into my collarbone, muffled and accusing. "I told you to wait for me."
"It's not news, I read the contract. Third strike, you're out, back to Earth, roll credits." I held on, maybe a little too long, since the alternative was making a face I didn't want her to see. "It was fine."
She pulled back to look at me, hands on my arms, and her smile did the small, complicated thing it had done each time I told her my trial matches were over. She'd always been able to read me. That was the trouble with people who'd known you that long. "You've got this," she said quietly.
"Third time's the charm." I grinned so hard it hurt.
"Chlo."
"Don't." I kept the grin nailed up. "Don't do the voice. I get enough voice from the cow lady. You know I came to your wedding, Maisie. Flew across actual space, watched you marry a seven-foot man who looks at you like you invented love, and cried so hard a stranger gave me his pocket square, and on the flight home I thought, screw it. I want that. I'm allowed to want that."
"You are."
"So I signed up. And the first guy was lovely and we had the chemistry of two damp towels, and the second guy I genuinely think was just lonely for someone to listen to him talk about drainage, and I kissed him once out of politeness and we both knew. Now I'm down to my last swing and if I whiff it they putme on a boat." I heard my own voice get faster and brighter, all the words in my throat racing to the finish line. "It's fine. It's fascinating, actually. I'm a case study. They'll name a syndrome after me."
Maisie didn't laugh. She'd heard the jokes before, once after each trial that ended with me back at the Agency, and she'd stopped finding it funny months ago. She just looked at me with those steady hazel eyes, and she said, "You're a freaking prize. The next minotaur is going to know it."
"Tell that to my permanent record," I said, and looped my arm through hers before she could say anything kind enough to undo me in the street.
We walked. The main street of New Knossos ran wide and rutted, churned to mud where the loggers dragged their sleds, and the buildings hunched along it in heavy dark timber, low-roofed and broad-doored so the bulls could pass without ducking.
Everything was built three sizes too big. A bench I'd have needed a running start to climb onto, a horse trough, except for something that wasn't a horse, that I could've taken a bath in. Big flannel-shouldered men nodded to Maisie as we passed, and a couple of them nodded to me too, with the careful, calculating look of bachelors running the numbers on whether the twice-returned human was back in play. I was choosing to find it flattering rather than grim.
"Okay," I said. "Tell me about the men coming to the orchard tonight. Tall, I assume. Horned, I'm counting on. Walk me through the buffet."
I wasn't looking at her face, but I could practically hear her roll her eyes.
Maisie sighed. "There's a few you've never really looked at," she said. "Korfas is sweet. Big quiet guy, he listens, you've met him a dozen times and never given him a real shot. Zarcal'sfunny, he'll talk your ear off. Half the unmated males will turn out tonight regardless, fair warning, an available woman in this town is basically a parade, and right now you're the only float." She hesitated, and her arm tightened on mine. "And there's Lorkin, but he doesn't come to things, so don't get your hopes up about the scary blacksmith. He was at the wedding, but I don't think you met. He hid in the corner and scowled by the door and was gone before the dancing started. I doubt you got within ten feet of the man. He never leaves that forge otherwise."
My head turned, before I'd decided to let it, toward the smoke hanging over the far end of the street.
"Scary blacksmith, noted." I said. "And not interested. Couldn't pick him out of a lineup."
I could have picked his shoulders out of a lineup, but that, I decided, was a problem strictly for future Chloe, who would be drunk on fig cider and three excellent prospects deep by sundown, and far better equipped to handle it.
Future Chloe has historically been left holding a great deal of present Chloe's nonsense. She's a saint. She never complains.
She just quietly signs the departure forms when the rest of us lose our nerve.
2
LORKIN
I went backto the Agency that afternoon to finish what I'd fled that morning, and Nezara still wouldn't strike my name.
"You presented yourself at the appointment," she said, not looking up from her crates. "That makes you a candidate in good standing. I cannot strike a compliant citizen from the rolls because he scowled at my clerk this morning and walked out without a word."
"I didn't ask to be on the rolls."
"And yet." She found the form she wanted and laid it flat. "Take it up with whoever submitted you. I only process what I'm given." Her eyes flicked up, unbothered. "Though you might ask yourself why a man so set against being matched drove into town the instant the countdown hit zero, fled before he'd said one word to me, and then came back before dark to argue the point, instead of paying the fine and forgetting the whole thing."
