Page 13 of Ward

A long pause. The honest kind.

“Better,” he said, and then, as if the word had cost him a security clearance, he took his tray to the corner table and did not look at her for the rest of the service.

Tisha wiped the same spot on the pass four more times, grinning down at the steel.

It pleased her unreasonably. She interrogated the unreasonably that night, briefly, lying in her bunk with the plant for a witness — because fun was fun, but she knew the difference between playing a long game with a shy stray and whatever it meant that she’d rebuilt a braise four times for one metronome-stutter from a man with a whole language she couldn’t read written up his neck in gold.

The station ticked. The plant said nothing.

“It’s fine,” she told it, eventually, cheerfully, in the voice she used for decisions. “He’s interesting. Interesting is fine.”

She went to sleep, and if she woke already composing tomorrow’s special, that was just the job. It had always been just the job.

Chapter 5

Aldric

The avoidance campaign lasted five days, and Aldric would later assess it as the worst-planned operation of his career.

The doctrine was sound. Distance was the correct response to an unsecured variable, and the chef was an unsecured variable of a category he had no protocols for.

So: distance.

He shifted his meals off the seventh bell to the dead hours, when the hall ran a skeleton line and the corner table sat in a pool of quiet.

The first night, at the tenth bell, the skeleton line had the braise.

Held back, portioned, labeled. The four-armed cook slid a tray across without being asked, with the exact economy of a standing order, and Aldric stood there holding it and understood that his troop movements had been anticipated by a supply officer of superior experience.

The second night he came in the dead hour before first bell.

The hall was not empty.

Dawn was when the bread was made; he had failed to include the single most fundamental fact of bakery logistics in his planning.

The skeleton line was dark and the corner table sat in its pool of quiet, exactly as briefed. But past the pass, the kitchen was lit in one long gold bar, and inside it, sleeves shoved to the elbow and flour to the wrist, the chef was folding dough in a tub roughly the size of a field cot.

Alone.

She looked up. She did not look surprised. He was beginning to suspect she had no setting for it.

“Morning, Eric,” she said. “Or night. Nobody’s ever figured out what to call the hour before first bell.”

“Aldric.”

“Got it.” She went back to the dough. “Nothing’s ready. Bread’s twenty minutes off the stone, and the braise is in the cold room behind a door I’m not opening with these hands. You can wait or you can starve. Stool’s by the pass.”

He did not take the stool. He took up a position by the pass, which was different, and which she did not appear to notice was different.

Through the last notch, the kitchen read as almost nothing: one mind, busy and unhurried, turned entirely toward a tub of dough. No aim in it anywhere.

He had walked into rooms with fewer defenses and felt more weather.

“Where is the baker?”

“Dot’s knees filed a grievance. I’m covering.” She leaned her weight into the fold — over, quarter-turn, over — with the economy of a woman who had done it ten thousand times and fully intended to do it ten thousand more. “Normally this is a two-person job. The tub, I mean. It goes up on the proofing rack, it’s heavier than it looks, and my other person is home with her feet up.” She glanced at him, measuring, the way she might size up a cut of meat. “You’re here. You’re large.”

“I’m not on duty in your kitchen.”