Delivered and Devoured (Alien Recovery Files)

Chapter 1

Don’t Fuck This Up

Lorri

Twelve interviews in six weeks. Eleven rejections. One callback. And the only thing standing between me and a humiliating comm to my mother tonight is a job interview I am about to walk into wearing a top that has, in the last forty-eight hours, betrayed me.

The mirror in the Level Two washroom has seen everything and still thinks badly of me, and it is currently telling me, in fluorescent unforgiving detail, that the lucky top is no longer lucky.

It used to come down to my hips. The dryer, in concert with the ancient station laundromat on Level Six and a setting I do not remember selecting, has shortened it by three inches and tightened it by two and removed any pretense that this is a garment I can wear in public on the morning of a job interview that means everything.

The neckline plunges with conviction, and the hem flirts with my ribs.

Across my chest the fabric is doing a thing the seamstress in my colony’s market would have called generous, sweetheart in the tone of a woman selling you back your own dignity at a markup.

Lucky, my mother said, when she pressed it into my hands the day I left home. “Wear it the first day of every new thing. You hear me, baby? Every single first day.”

I hear you, Mama.

Six years and three jobs into this top. The fabric is honey-colored and soft and the embroidery at the hem is hers, and I have worn it the first morning of every interview I have ever had, and I cannot — I cannot — show up at SNAG having ditched it because the dryer was rude.

That is asking the universe to fail me before I have opened my mouth.

So I am wearing it. Under the only thing I had left in the duffel that fit over it.

Which is a utility jacket two sizes too big I bought at the Finder’s Market the night I arrived, in a panic, because the freight company had lost my luggage and I needed something with pockets and the shop was closing.

Jacket open: the lucky top is on display in ways my mother did not embroider it for.

Jacket closed: I look like I have something in there I do not want anyone to know about, and the Level Two air is already two degrees too warm.

The zipper goes up. The zipper goes halfway back down. The zipper goes up. The mirror gives me the look a station auntie gives a bride who has chosen poorly.

“Okay.” Quiet. To my reflection. Both hands flat on the sink. “Okay. We are going to do this.”

The hazel eyes in the mirror do not look convinced.

“You walked here. That’s the hardest part. The application coach said. Walking through the door.” A breath. “You are competent. You are kind. You are — fine in this jacket. People wear jackets. People are wearing jackets all over this station right now. Nobody is going to look at your jacket.”

The fluorescent light flickers. The universe has never been subtle.

“You are going to walk in there, and you are going to be calm and friendly and professional, and you are going to answer the questions she asks you, Lorri, just the question, you do not have to volunteer your entire life story when she asks why you applied —”

The washroom door hisses. A station janitorial bot the size of a footstool trundles in, ignores me with the focused indifference of a small machine on a deadline, and begins to mop around my boots.

“Right,” I tell it. “Yes. Off I go. Thank you.”

It does not respond. It has more to do today than I do.

Bergamot reaches me from forty feet away, threading up out of an open door under a hand-painted sign that hangs slightly crooked.

SNAG RECOVERY SERVICES. Someone painted the letters.

Someone cared about the letters. Warmth spills from the doorway, a degree above corridor temperature, and I can feel it against my cheek before I am close enough to see anyone inside.

My hand goes to the zipper again — up, then a half-inch back down, because the lucky top has to be in the room — and I make myself stop.

A dent in the wall inside the door, fist-sized, covered with a sticker someone has hand-drawn in marker. EVIDENCE OF STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE. Round handwriting. Tiny circle over the ‘i’.

Don’t laugh. Do not laugh. It is a structural defect with a sticker; you don’t know what is funny about it yet.

“Sweet Maker.” A honey-blonde head pops up from a brown notebook two desks away. “There she is. Lorri Vance, yes? Come in, come in, mind the dent.”

“Yes — yes, Lorri, that’s me, hi —”

Stop saying yes. She knows. She said my name.

“Florence Knight. Flossie. You and I spoke on the comm last week.”

“You said I had a friendly voice.”

She blinks. Then she smiles. The smile doesn’t move much on her face, but does a lot in her eyes.

“I did say that, didn’t I? Well. Sit, lovey. Anywhere. Mind Maurice.”

Maurice, it turns out, is a stuffed animal of indeterminate species perched on a desk that has not yet been claimed.

Above me, a cat’s-cradle of fairy lights drifts across mismatched ceiling tiles.

Behind Flossie, mugs hang from hooks: I’M NOT BOSSY, I’M THE BOSS, LIVE LAUGH LITIGATE, one in a language I don’t read with what looks like a tiny embroidered explosion under the handle.

The chair I lower myself into creaks in a register I refuse to acknowledge.

She complimented my voice. Sit up straight. Hands. What do I do with hands? On the lap. No, she’ll think I’m sitting on them. Knees. On the knees. Casually. Do not look casual on the knees.

A mug lands in front of me. Chipped rim. The right temperature.

“Tea before we start,” Flossie says. She is already sitting, notebook open, pen poised. Brown eyes. Cardigan the color of old butter. Four pens stuck in various places about her person. “I’m doing all my interviews over a brew. You’ll find I do most things over a brew.”

“In case nobody’s told you the long version,” she says, “we take cases nobody else will. Things that have gone missing in ways that don’t make sense.

People who walked off a station they shouldn’t have been able to walk off.

Cargo that arrives without the courier who was carrying it.

The official lines won’t touch any of it.

We will. Mother sends us a few high-priority cases which come across her desk, and sometimes people find us. That’s the whole pitch.”

“And — sorry, Mother is —”

“Mother Morrison runs OOPS. Orion Outpost Postal Service. Couriers,” Flossie says, in a tone that suggests she has had to explain this several times this week.

“Largest independent postal network this side of the belt. Ferries everything from a wedding ring across two stations to a family of refugees across a war. If something needs to get from A to B and you can’t trust the official lines, you call Mother.

She has been doing this for twenty-three years. She and I have an arrangement.”

“An arrangement.”

“She finds the things her couriers cannot, in good conscience, deliver. She sends them to me. I find what she could not. We split the difficult work. It is a recent arrangement. I am still grateful she helps us at all since I left OOPS as a courier.”

“That’s — that’s very —”

“Sweet of her, yes. I think so too. She would die before admitting it. Drink your tea, lovey. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”

“All your —”

“You’re the first one I’ve sat down with, lovey. We’ve been open for three weeks and four days. Don’t quote me on that. The bunting hasn’t gone up yet.”

Three weeks and four days. The dent is three weeks and four days old.

The handwritten sign is three weeks and four days old.

They are making this up as they go, and I am one of the first through the door, and the chair I am sitting in might not yet be a chair; it might be a piece of evidence in someone’s lawsuit.

“SPROUT,” Flossie adds, “give us a few minutes, would you?”

The amber orb in the corner of the ceiling pulses once. “Of course, Flossie.”

A female head pops up over a partition three desks back, sharp-eyed and delighted. "Oh, I like this one. She apologized to the mop bot. I watched her do it."

"That's Petra," Flossie says, not looking up. "She watches everything. SPROUT helps."

"I assist with nothing of the sort," SPROUT says, in the tone of an orb caught mid-assist.

I keep two hands on the mug because one is shaking and two together is steadier, and I drink.

The tea is exactly the right temperature, and I have been here for forty-five seconds, and something clicks into place — the tripwire kind, the kind you notice after you’ve already stepped over it — that this woman knows how to do this.

The chipped mug and the right-temperature tea and the small joke with the orb are all part of a rhythm designed, gently, to stop me running out of the building before she has finished writing my name in her notebook.

New office or not. First interview or not.

My spine straightens. The mug goes down, so I am holding nothing.

“Right.” Flossie’s pen moves. “Tell me why you applied.”

The application coach said: one sentence. They asked you a question. Answer the question. Do not volunteer.

“I want to do work that — sorry, can I start that again. I want to be useful, and I have spent six years doing jobs that were quiet, and I am very good at quiet jobs, and I would like to try a job that — that isn’t.

That matters.” A breath. “I read your posting and I cried. A little. Not in a — not unprofessionally. I just. The bit about the cases nobody else takes. That bit.”

That was too many sentences. I said that I cried. WHY DID I SAY I CRIED?

The pen does not pause. Flossie’s eyes do not lift.

“That’s a good answer.”

A small noise comes out of me that is not, technically, a word.

“What I’d like to know about now is —”

The door to her left opens.