Page 3 of Ward

The agency office was structurally pink, as though the room itself had been grown from optimism. Its soft chairs accommodated many anatomies; its fountain was smaller than the lobby’s but no less sincere. Re-lee rose from behind her desk when he entered, and her delight arrived ahead of her like a bow wave, and Aldric took the deepest breath the last notch allowed and walked into it.

“Guard Aldric.” She said his name the way other beings said festival mornings. “Sit, sit. This won’t take long, and I promise it’s painless. I’ve processed nine hundred and forty matches. Not one fatality.”

“That you know of.”

“Oh, humor,” she said, delighted, making a note. “Good. That helps with the pairing.”

The intake consisted of confirming what the database had already extracted from Vorjan House’s records, and of questions. He answered the operational ones with military brevity — dietary restrictions, none; schedule constraints, extensive; communication preferences, minimal. Then she reached the other section, and folded her hands, and looked at him with her antennae at an angle he would learn, over the coming month, to dread.

“What is a smell that means comfort to you?”

“I don’t follow the relevance.”

“That’s all right. Most warriors say that.” She waited, pen up, serene as orbit. “Take your time. It’s the question people answer most wrongly first.”

He intended to decline. He heard himself, instead, after a silence he could not account for, say: “Trella.” And then, because the word had come out unguarded and needed cover: “It’s a flower. It carries. That’s all — it carries further than most things.”

Re-lee wrote it down without comment, which was worse than comment.

“You should understand,” Aldric said, retrieving the initiative, “that I’m here under obligation. I’ll complete your process to the letter. But the outcome is decided. Whatever your database produces, I’ll be filing a rejection at the end of the window. It would be a kindness to flag that in the file, for the other party’s sake.”

“I’ll note it,” Re-lee said, and did, radiantly, untroubled, as though he had told her the weather. Then she looked up, and for one moment the radiance settled into something older and stiller, nine hundred and forty matches deep. “One thing, though, for your own file. Beings come in here and tell me what they want. They’re almost never lying, and they’re almost never right.” She smiled at him, gently, terribly. “The database doesn’t match you to what you ask for, Guard Aldric. It matches you to what you are. You’d be astonished how rarely those are the same.”

He left with a scheduling card he had not agreed to and the distinct sensation of having lost an engagement he could not name.

That night he lay in the grey silence of his quarters and ran the day’s accounting like a good garrison commander, and the ledger balanced everywhere except one line.

The station pressed at the walls — seventeen hundred minds turning through the dark, their wanting dimmed to weather by the last notch — and sleep came the way it always came, late and shallow and disciplined. He just had to survive the month. He had survived campaigns. He had survived tribunals. He had survived years that had teeth in them, and he would survive thirty days of soft chairs and pink forms and extraordinary bread.

The last thing he thought, unauthorized, as sleep took him, was that the flatbread had tasted like a full house — and still would not fit anywhere in his ledger.

Chapter 2

Tisha

The trick with feeding a Paxian was the second helping.

Tisha had worked it out her first month on station: Paxians would never, ever ask. Something about hospitality debts — Renn had tried to explain it once with all four hands going and she’d gotten maybe a third of it — but the upshot was that a Paxian would sit in front of an empty bowl radiating polite starvation until the heat death of the universe before requesting more. So you didn’t make them ask. You just walked the pot down the line and refilled the bowl mid-sentence, like it was a thing that happened to everyone, and watched their whole family unclench.

She refilled three bowls on her way down table six. The grandfather at the end said something in Paxian that the translator rendered as “the sauce has authority,” which she was going to have embroidered on an apron someday.

Feeding forty species was mostly a matter of respecting the theologies. The Paxians and their hospitality debts. The Charro, who considered a shared plate more binding than most human weddings and had to be seated accordingly. The Andovi, who blessed. The two silicate gentlemen from the survey team, who didn’t technically eat but attended every dinner service anyway and had explained, when she’d finally asked, that the smell of a working kitchen was the closest thing their species had to music. She kept a chair for them by the warm end of the line. Every world sent its hungry up the Bridge with the hunger shaped a little differently; underneath the knives and manifests, her job was learning the shape before they had to explain it.

“Authority,” she told Renn, back behind the line. “The sauce has authority. Write that down.”

“You say that about every compliment.” Renn had four pans going, one per hand, which was the single most useful trait ever to walk into her kitchen. “Last week you wanted the apron to say ‘tastes like the good kind of crying.’”

“Both aprons. I contain multitudes.” She spun to the pass, checked the next tickets, and clocked the room the way she did every ninety seconds without thinking about it — a habit older than the station or culinary school. New base, new school, new cafeteria, new room: find the exits, find the friendlies, find the kid eating alone. Her father had taught her the first two on purpose. The third one she’d taught herself.

Dining hall, third bell after midday. Two Paxian families, a table of dock crew arguing happily about a ball game happening two hundred thousand miles below, a knot of Earth contractors up from the Bridge refit — louder than they needed to be, but hungry, and hungry she could work with.

A pair of green Charro splitting a dessert with one spoon.

And Brooklyn from the bio labs at her usual spot, actually eating today instead of just drinking coffee, which meant the blue-haired guard she’d been matched with had probably walked her here himself. He did that. Tisha approved of him enormously.

The kitchen banged and hissed and steamed at her back, and every burner was a known quantity, and the bread had come out right, and somewhere in the middle of all of it was the thing she’d stopped even calling happiness because it was more structural than that.

Load-bearing.