Page 17 of Ward

On the fourteenth day — he was counting; the window made counting mandatory; sixteen days remained — she caught him at the pass with the tray in his hands and said, “Settle a bet. Renn says Dalgurians can’t taste sweet. I say Renn’s thinking of Paxians.”

“Renn is thinking of Paxians.”

“Ha.” She pointed at him with a serving spoon, vindicated, luminous, briefly and catastrophically the only thing in the room. “Knew it. You ate the whole cinnamon roll.”

“That was one occasion.”

“It was one cinnamon roll. Occasions are how it starts.” And she was gone again, down the line, refilling the grandfather mid-sentence, leaving him standing at the pass in possession of a tray, a braise, and the appalling knowledge that at some point in the last two weeks, without one shot fired, the question of whether he would be at dinner had stopped being a question.

He took the corner table. He left one bite of the flatbread for a pretense neither of them believed anymore.

Sixteen days, he told himself, and for the first time the number did not sound like a sentence commuted. It sounded like something running out.

Chapter 6

Tisha

The Andovi greens came in on the morning freight, and so did the trouble.

Seventeen covers tonight, four species, and the official produce allocation had arrived right on schedule, nine days late, in a crate that smelled like a refrigerator’s last words.

Tisha had a better system.

The better system was a woman named Pell — Andovi, very tall, very patient, faintly lavender — who grew greens in the hydroponic racks of her family’s hauler and came through the freight dock every fifth day.

Two loaves a crate.

Nobody had ever written any of it down.

She was stacking crates onto a hand truck and listening to Pell describe, at length and with gestures, a nephew’s courtship, when the dock went quiet behind her in a way she had learned to recognize as large and blue.

“That transfer,” said a voice like a hatch closing, “is not on the manifest.”

She turned.

Formal blues.

A data slate.

Her corner-table problem, out of his corner, wearing the look of a man who had been reading something for twenty minutes and disliked every line of it.

“Morning, Eric,” she said. “It’s bread.”

“It’s an unlogged biological transfer across a docking interface.” He didn’t look at the bread. He looked at the crates. “Station quarantine code, section twelve. I’m reviewing the delegation’s cold-chain freight on this dock, and I’m required to flag anything that crosses undocumented.”

“Then flag the official greens. They came through documented, and they’re half compost.”

“That isn’t my jurisdiction.”

“Neither’s my bread.”

Pell, who had survived three species’ worth of customs inspectors and knew a jurisdictional dispute when she was standing in one, became deeply interested in a hinge.

“Material that hasn’t been screened can carry things neither of you can see,” he said, flat and even. “A station is a closed system. One bad crate, and it isn’t your kitchen that pays for it. It’s the people who ate there.”

That one landed, and she hated that it landed, because he’d aimed it straight at the thing she cared about most and he was not wrong.

“You think I’d feed people something I hadn’t checked?” It came out hotter than she meant. Her voice almost never did that. “I’ve been cooking off Pell’s racks for two years. I know her water. I know her soil mix. I know what her nephew’s girlfriend thinks of his singing. You know what the official supply chain is? A form. This is a person.”