Page 34 of Ward

The aide’s eyes came to Aldric with the apology of a man about to say something he’d been sent to say. “There’s a view — Earth-side liaison put it forward — that it might be prudent, optics-wise, for delegation security to minimize public-floor presence for the remainder. Meals in the delegation mess. Movement by service corridor. Just until the — “

“No,” Aldric said.

It arrived flat, immediate, and slightly ahead of any decision he was aware of making, and he felt Falkin’s attention swing to him from across the table with the weight of a search lamp.

“The commons is where the threat surfaced,” he continued, in briefing cadence, building the road under a position his body had already taken. “Withdrawing security from the exact floor where a station worker was assaulted, in response to feed pressure, teaches every hostile actor watching that the pressure works. It also abandons the personnel Hargrove is actually targeting — who are not this delegation, as I stated last week. They’re the humans who work with us. The kitchen took yesterday’s attack.” He kept his eyes on the aide and his voice on doctrine. “Coverage on the commons doubles. I’ll take the seventh-bell posting personally. That’s the security recommendation. Log the liaison’s objection.”

The aide logged it. The briefing moved on. Falkin said nothing at all, which from Falkin was a standing ovation with searchlights, and caught him afterward in the corridor for exactly one sentence, delivered at low volume with the yard-grip on his shoulder.

“For a man filing in three days, that ’no’ deployed remarkably fast.”

Aldric did not dignify it. There was nothing in it he could dignify.

He went down to the commons ahead of midday service to walk the hall’s approaches like a man inspecting a position — and found exactly one variable he had come, officially, to secure.

Waiting would have been cowardice, and he had never once in his life been permitted that.

The hall between services was half-lit and quiet, chairs up, the four-armed cook prepping somewhere back in the steel with a clatter like distant small arms. She was at the pass with a tablet and a cold coffee, doing manifests, and she looked up when he came in and did not perform surprise. She never performed anything. It remained the most disorienting terrain he had ever operated in.

“Morning,” she said. “Tray came back empty. I noted it in your file.”

“The window closes in three days.”

It came out the way he’d drilled it in the corridor on the walk down — flat, formal, a briefing item, delivered from parade rest with his hands behind his back where their steadiness could not be audited. She set down the tablet.

“On day thirty I’ll be filing the rejection.” He held the amber level; he owed her eyes, at minimum. “I want that stated plainly, in advance, so it isn’t — so there’s no ambush in it. You’ve been.” He had prepared this sentence and it failed anyway, the way every prepared sentence failed inside her sixty paces. “The kitchen has been. Courteous. Beyond anything the arrangement required. That courtesy shouldn’t leave you with a false impression. The filing was decided before I docked. It has nothing to do with —” the braise, the card, the half-second, the month, every stone of the wall she’d walked through by standing still “— with any deficiency on the station’s part.”

There. Stated. Perimeter re-established, in language even his own body could not misread. He stood in the half-lit hall and waited for it to hold.

Tisha looked at him.

She looked at him for a long moment — no cheer deployed, no blade laid flat, none of the working registers he had catalogued across a month of services.

Just looking.

Direct and unhurried and impossibly unafraid, the little fairy considering the fortress with her head very slightly tilted, and though his cuff sat at the last notch, though not one particle of feeling crossed the air between them, he had the sensation, absolute and vertiginous, of being read to the foundations.

Of her walking the perimeter in the silence, noting the fresh mortar, the reinforced gate, the sign hung out front announcing in three days this position will be abandoned, and arriving without hurry at the only conclusion the evidence supported.

That the garrison had never once fired on her. That every retreat had ended at her seventh bell. That the announcement she had just received, stated plainly, in advance, from parade rest, was the single most elaborate act of asking for help she had ever been handed across that pass.

“Okay,” she said.

He had braced for every response in the catalogue.

For hurt, and had hated the anticipation of it enough that he’d nearly turned back twice on the walk down.

For argument, which would at least have had the decency to be terrain he knew.

For the blade laid flat — some bright dismantling delivered at portion-counting volume, three days is a lot of dinners weaponized, the name gag deployed at killing range.

He had drafted counter-positions for all of it, standing in the lift like a man reviewing breach protocols, and the drafting itself should have told him everything: no man prepares that thoroughly for a conversation that doesn’t matter.

She said okay.

That was all. Gently, evenly, disastrously: okay.

Not a challenge, which he could have met; not hurt, which would have burned but clarified.