Page 30 of Ward

She didn’t get the chance.

Marsh stood up first.

He didn’t want the burger. He stood at her pass with his crew fanned loose behind him — a formation she recognized before she could name its wrongness — and pitched his voice for the room.

“You her?” A jerk of his chin at the feed still looping somewhere in his skull. “The one who feeds them.”

“I’m the one who feeds everybody,” Tisha said, pleasantly, hands flat and easy on the steel. “Including you, three times this week. You want the special or not, Marsh?”

Using his name was a base-brat reflex: name them, humanize the room, lower the heat. It worked on men who were still mostly embarrassed underneath.

Marsh had gone somewhere past embarrassed.

The name in her mouth hit him as familiarity, and familiarity from her, tonight, with her face fresh off a traitor graphic, was fuel.

“Don’t.” His color climbed. “Don’t you say my name like we’re — you put your own people last, you know that? Everything warm goes to them first —" it didn't; the man had eaten her first-out burgers all week "— and the rest of us get treated like nothing."

The hall had gone quiet in rings, the way halls do. Renn had drifted up on her left, four hands loose. Her pulse beat level and fast in her wrists; the Paxian grandfather’s fear shifted the air two tables back. She kept her voice at stew-temperature, because maybe forty beings ate here and the room they thought they were in depended on what this moment became.

“Okay,” she said. “Here’s how it works. You can sit down, and eat, and be angry — plenty of angry men eat here; food doesn’t check. Or you can walk. Up to you.”

For one long second, it almost landed.

Then Marsh’s arm came back — the tray off the pass, a full one, plates and all, a big man’s whole shoulder loading up to hurl it at her face across four feet of steel — and the hall inhaled, and Tisha’s body was already turning, and —

He was there.

She had not seen him cross the room.

Nobody had seen him cross the room; the room would argue about it for a week — twenty meters, seated to standing to there, in the time it took a tray to come off a pass.

There was no collision.

That was what she’d replay: no crash, no roar, none of the grammar of a bar fight.

There was simply a grey-blue hand closed on Marsh’s wrist at the top of its arc, absolute as a docking clamp, and the tray taken out of it and set without one plate ringing back onto the pass.

Then Marsh was folding, wrist rotated somewhere wrists didn’t argue with, down onto one knee against the steel with his arm locked behind him at an angle that ended the debate without opening one.

Aldric stood over the kneeling man with the stillness of deep water, amber eyes flat as a checked instrument.

When Marsh’s nearest friend twitched, that flat gaze lifted, and the friend discovered urgent business with his own boots.

“You’re going to be still now,” Aldric said, in the tone other beings used for reading manifests.

Marsh was still. The whole hall was still. Somebody had called security.

Until they arrived nobody moved except Tisha, who unlocked her own hands from the steel, and breathed, and looked at the man who had crossed twenty meters between two beats of her heart.

He was not looking at Marsh.

He was looking at her — the sweep, the assessment, are you hit, are you whole, the ninety-second perimeter check compressed to half a second and aimed entirely at her.

The amber in his eyes banked back down, a flame turned to pilot.

Then she watched it catch up with him: forty witnesses, Hargrove's feeds still running, and a man who'd sworn in front of this same room that he'd be filing his rejection.

Fury came over his face like weather off a ridge.