Andrew steps out with his tablet already in his hand, mid-stride, and he gets three steps into the lobby before he registers me. “Scar.” Something crosses his face too fast to name and is replaced by the easy warmth that does not feel genuine. “What are you doing here?”
“Waiting.”
“Right.” He laughs, glancing around the empty lobby as though the answer might be standing somewhere behind me. “For…?”
“Your sister.”
“Huh.” He tucks the tablet under his arm. “Early start.”
“Yes.”
He waits for the rest. There is no rest. I have found that beings will fill a silence with almost anything if you simply decline to fill it yourself, and Andrew Wilson is a male who cannot let a silence lie there. “Work thing?” he says. “Grid stuff? Because we’re not scheduled on the archive until…”
“Rosters.”
“Rosters. Sure.” His smile stays exactly where it is. “You know you could just message her. She’s got a tablet. She’s had it surgically attached to her hand since she was nineteen.”
“I could.”
It’s a perfectly civil moment. Two beings exchanging pleasantries before shift. And underneath it there’s something hard. He’s been smiling since the lift doors opened. It is an excellent fake smile, and it has not once in this conversation reached anywhere near his eyes.
“Well,” he says, and takes half a step closer, and drops his voice into something warmer, more confiding, brother-to-brother. “Look, since we’re both here… Mara’s got a lot on her plate right now. This contract’s the biggest thing she’s ever taken on and she’s had a rough year, personally. Bad breakup, the whole thing.” He gives me a rueful little shrug, one male to another. “She gets attached to people fast, always has. It’s a good quality and it’s gotten her hurt about a dozen times.”
I say nothing.
“So.” He spreads his hands, pleasant and reasonable. “It’s just, she’s mine to look out for, you know? That’s my job. There’s only the two of us.”
She’s mine to look out for.
I turn the phrase over the way I’d turn over a crystal in the tunnel. On its face it’s nothing. A brother, protective, staking a claim to his own sister’s welfare. Any male might say it. My own brothers have said versions of it about their brides for years. It’s theminethat snags and the smoothness of the delivery, the way it arrived pre-assembled, as though he’d had it ready in his mouth before he came down in the lift.
“She’s an adult female,” I say. “She looks out for herself.”
Andrew’s smile flickers, just for an instant, and then he laughs, “Ha. She’d love hearing you say that.”
The lift chimes again behind him.
Mara steps out.
She’s got her gear on and her hair pulled back. She fights with a glove and looks up and sees me. And shelights up.It sweeps across her beautiful face at once, surprise and then something bright and unguarded. “Cayzor.” She comes across the lobby fast. “What are, did we have something this morning? I didn’t have anything on my…”
“No.”
“No?”
“I came to walk with you.” Six words, and every one of them true, and I hear how they land in the quiet lobby.
Her mouth opens. Closes. A flush comes up her throat and she looks, for a moment, entirely undone, and then she recovers, and grins at me. “Well. Okay. Good. I have about eleven questions about the maintenance archive and you’ve saved me having to type them.”
“That’s why I came.”
“Sure it is,” Andrew grumbles.
I ignore him. So does Mara.
“Morning, Mar,” her brother then says brightly. “Ready? We’re going to get eaten alive on level four hundred today.”
“Morning.” She’s still faintly pink. “Cayzor’s walking with us.”
