Page 19 of Ward

Different file entirely. She was going to have to move him.

Then Renn came in, took in the crates with all four eyes, and said, “Who carried those?” and she said, “Nobody,” and went to make salad for seventeen.

The negotiation dinner was seventeen covers, four species, two dietary theologies, and one man standing against the wall like a decorative threat, and Tisha had catered worse with less. At least nobody here required their food blessed by an officiant. The Andovi did, and their officiant was chronically late, and that was a story she only told at parties.

The private dining room sat off the venue level, all soft acoustics and diplomatic lighting, and the seating chart had been revised four times by three offices. Took forever to get there.

STATION ADMIN — FINAL

Like a hostage note, the seating chart hit her prep counter that morning. Trade counsel at the head. Station admin flanking. The Vorjan delegation along the window side, Falkin among them with his blue hair and his ease, and Brooklyn beside him in the shirt she wore to things she’d rather not be at.

And security on the wall: Eric, in the same blues, gold at his collar catching the diplomatic lighting every time he turned his head to sweep the room.

Which was constantly.

She’d seen him work exactly once before, that morning on the freight dock, and most of that had been an argument.

It was like watching herself run a dinner rush, if a dinner rush could kill you: the same ninety-second sweep, the same total custody of the exits, the same refusal to ever quite come off the balls of his feet.

Huh, she thought, carrying in the first course. Same job. Different stakes.

The dinner itself ran the way those dinners ran. The counsel praised the soup in the manner of a being building goodwill for later use. The admin said hopeful things about frameworks. Nobody said the word Hargrove, which meant everybody was thinking it; the man’s name had developed the gravitational property of silence. She came and went with courses and refills and read the table out of professional habit — who ate, who performed eating, whose glass emptied fastest — and filed it all in the place she kept the weather.

The counsel, for the record, ate. Properly, gratefully, a being far from home doing honor to a table, and she liked him for it. The admin performed eating, which she’d expected. The Earth-side liaison on the wall screen did not eat, being a wall screen, but managed nonetheless to radiate the particular energy of a man whose next call was going to be worse than this one, and when the counsel raised, delicately, the matter of “the public climate below” — the closest anyone came all night to the unsaid name — she watched every fork at the table pause at once, a whole room of beings holding the same breath about the same planet.

“The climate is noise,” the admin said, hopefully.

“Noise,” said the counsel, gently, spearing a root, “is what avalanches are made of. We would all do well to keep feeding each other through it.” He raised his glass half an inch toward the pass, toward her, with the courtesy of an old being who knew exactly which member of tonight’s assembly was holding the room together, and Tisha topped up his water and decided he could stay.

Brooklyn caught her at the service door during the cheese course, on the pretext of helping stack plates, which no one born of woman had ever believed of Brooklyn.

“So,” Brooklyn said, at kitchen volume, which for her was a whisper. “You and the wall.”

“There is no me and the wall. The wall files paperwork in two weeks.”

“Mm.” Brooklyn had a way of saying mm that could hold an entire briefing. “You know about the cuff? The ear thing?”

“I know it’s not jewelry.”

“It’s a dampener. They feel—” Brooklyn made a gesture that took in the room, the station, the general catastrophe of everyone. “Everything. Everyone. All the time. The cuff turns the volume down, but down isn’t off. Falkin says a crowded room is like standing in surf.” She picked up a plate she had no intention of stacking. “Falkin also says that one—” She gave a micro-tilt of her head toward the wall. “—runs his tighter than anyone he’s ever met. Has for years. Like a man who bricked up his own windows.” A beat. “Thought you’d want the schematics. Since you’re not interested.”

“I’m not.”

“Mm,” said Brooklyn, and went back to her seat, leaving the plate.

Tisha ran the dessert course by muscle memory while the schematics settled somewhere behind her sternum. Everything. Everyone. All the time. She thought about the dining hall at the seventh bell — the noise of it, the glorious rowdy soup of a hundred beings feeling their feelings at maximum volume — and the man in the corner with his back to the wall, coming there anyway, every night, to eat.

She’d thought he sat in the corner for the sightlines. Sightlines, sure. Also: minimum crowd exposure, walls on two sides, the shortest possible crossing to the door.

He came to the loudest room on the station, every day, on purpose, and paid for it in a currency she couldn’t see, and she’d been charging him one mispronounced name per visit on top of it.

Interesting, she thought, and the word had developed a lean.

She got her question in at the end, and it wasn’t even planned, which was her favorite kind of question.

The dinner broke up in the slow diplomatic way, beings pooling toward the door in twos and threes to say the things they’d actually come to say. She was clearing the sideboard when the wall detached itself and became a man crossing toward his final exit sweep. His path took him past her. She was elbow-deep in serving dishes with her guard down, and that was her excuse for what came out.

“Can I ask you something?”