Page 14 of Ward

“Nobody’s on duty in my kitchen before first bell. That’s why I’m asking.” She wiped her hands on her apron. “You can say no. Then I drag it, which takes ten minutes, and the bread’s late, and you wait longer. Up to you.”

It was, he noted, the second time this station had outmaneuvered him with a policy. This one was simply called hunger.

He came around the pass.

The tub was heavy, a living weight that shifted as he took it, and he lifted it the way he would have lifted a wounded man, from the knees, and set it on the rack where she pointed, and stepped back. That should have been the end of it.

“Okay,” she said, frowning into the tub. “One more fold. It’s slack on the far side. Hold the edge so it doesn’t walk on me.”

He held the edge. It put him close enough to smell the yeast on her and, under it, her: salt and warm skin and something green she washed her hair with. He catalogued it before he could stop himself, and then could not uncatalogue it. She reached into the dough, and he watched her hands because there was nothing else in the room to watch, and somewhere around the third fold his own hand moved without orders.

Not much. The dough had slumped against the rim beside his fingers, and his thumb went into it and pressed — once, firm, a small deep well — the way you seat a dumpling to hold its glaze.

The way you were taught at a counter you could barely see over, by someone who said, gently, there, like that, so it keeps what you give it.

He took his hand back as if the dough had burned him.

She’d seen. She had stopped folding.

“Huh,” she said. “Who taught you that?”

He could have said no one. He had a thousand closed doors stockpiled for exactly this kind of question. The one that came out was, “My mother.”

He heard it land in the warm air and could not retrieve it.

She did not pounce.

She nodded, as if he had told her the far side was slack, and went back to the dough. “Mine taught me on a footlocker,” she said. “We didn’t have a counter that year. You make bread on whatever’s flat.” Fold. Turn. “What was hers for?”

“Dumplings.” Another one gone. He set his jaw against the next. “Hearth-dumplings. A holiday dish. It isn’t relevant.”

“Sure,” she said. “Nothing relevant ever happens before first bell.”

She worked the last fold. He stood by the rack with flour on his thumb and did not wipe it off, because wiping it off would mean admitting it was there.

The ovens came up to heat with a sound like a breath drawn in. She turned the first rounds onto the stone with a long wooden peel, and then the smell came.

Bread and char and something sweet underneath, the smell of every first light in every full house he had ever eaten in — and his walls braced and found nothing to brace against.

It was only bread.

It was only morning.

She slid one round onto a plate, tore it in half so the steam came off it, and set it on the pass between them.

Not served to him. Set down.

Whether to pick it up was his decision.

He picked it up.

It was what he ate every night, in slow deliberate portions, with one bite always left behind. It was better before first bell, and he could not have said whether that was the stone, or the hour, or the fact that no one else in the galaxy was awake to watch him eat it.

“How is it?” she asked, without looking up from the peel.

“It’s—”

He stopped. Every word available to finish that sentence was a word he would have to live with.