Chapter 3
FALKIN
The reception level was worse than the corridor.
Falkin stood a pace inside the intake area, hands at his sides, while an attendant with too many arms sorted his credentials.
A dozen species crossed the great bright floor. Each one arrived through the cuff a half-second before his eyes: the Paxian family’s road-weariness, the honeymoon-flush of two green Charro, the shining sincere hope of every soul who’d come here to be matched.
It layered.
It stacked.
Not quite a headache.
Not yet.
He pressed the cuff to the last notch and breathed and did not let any of it reach his face.
Because the intake area was engineered to make beings feel, and feel loudly.
Soft warm light. A fountain. A ceiling that turned so gently it read as reassurance. All of it, no doubt, approved by Re-lee, the station’s IDA administrator, radiant and certain this was the greatest work in the galaxy.
To a human it probably felt like hope.
To Falkin it felt like standing in the surf during a festival.
Everyone around him was having the most emotional day of their lives at once. None of it aimed at him.
All of it hitting him anyway.
He’d been in worse rooms—rooms where the flood was fear and blood. This was only joy, mostly, and joy at volume was survivable.
He survived it.
“Guard Falkin.” The attendant slid his credential chip back across the counter with two of its hands. “Vorjan House delegation. Reception has your quarters. Liaison assignment comes through in the morning.”
“My thanks.”
He pocketed the chip. He did not go to his quarters.
Instead he stood a little longer than he needed to, near the fountain, ostensibly reading the great slow-turning directory board.
And actually… he could admit it to himself.
Scanning.
Scanning for what? He didn’t know.
Some unreasonable part of him had decided it would know her when he saw her, the way a struck note knows its harmony.
Foolish.
He’d told himself so three times on the transport.
He stood here scanning anyway, a senior guard of Vorjan House playing at prophecy in a hotel lobby.
You’re a soldier, not a poet.
Karuk would laugh at him—and then, being Karuk, say nothing, which would be worse.
Falkin let go of the directory board and started across the floor toward the lift bank.
Enough.
He’d meet her when he met her.
He would do this properly, in order, the way he did everything. At the—
On the far side of the fountain, a human woman crouched down in front of a broken luggage cart.
Falkin stopped.
Not dramatically.
Nothing about it was dramatic.
No chime, no strike of the harmonizing note, no cinematic hush.
He stopped, the busy room fading away as he focused on her.
She was fixing the cart.
It had jammed halfway across the concourse, one of the big freight ones.
Its owner was an elderly Paxian with a cane and a mounting cloud of frustration Falkin could feel from thirty paces.
He was standing over it doing that thing people did to broken machines, which was jab at it and get angrier.
The human woman, who did not appear to work with the intake department, carrying a canvas bag over her shoulder and a smear of something on the cuff of her sleeve, crouched down without being asked and got her hands into it.
He watched her find the fault.
He could see the exact moment.
The small still pause, the tilt of her head, her hand going straight to one spot and not another.
Competence that had stopped being conscious a long time ago.
Falkin had it himself, with a blade, with a room, with the shifting temperature of a negotiation. He knew it the way you knew your own reflection catching you off guard in a dark window.
Her hands did the work while the rest of her was already somewhere past it, on to the next thing, on to whatever waited two decks down.
There was no flourish in it.
No one had ever clapped for this woman, he’d have wagered, and she’d have hated it if they had.
She said something to the Paxian, easy and unbothered, and the old man’s frustration-cloud thinned as she talked.
Then she did some small firm thing with both thumbs and the cart wheel dropped and rolled and it came free.
The Paxian’s relief broke over the floor.
She waved off his thanks. Falkin watched her gestures, the little don’t, it’s nothing, go on.
She stood, and wiped her hands on a rag clipped to her belt, and that was it.
Ten seconds of someone else’s day, fixed and handed back, no receipt.
She was already turning to go.
Here was the thing that stopped Falkin where a struck note hadn’t.
She was warm.
Genuine warmth toward the old man and the small fixed problem, not performed. Not to look good, but because she could help him.
But under the warmth, folded up so neatly he almost missed it, was something braced. Something holding still the way a body holds still around an old injury, so used to the position it no longer knows it’s braced at all.
He knew that configuration. He lived inside a version of it—warmth on the surface, and under it a door held shut against a whole weather system.
She was doing it while fixing a stranger’s cart in a crowded room. Did she have the faintest idea? He’d have bet the last of his gold she didn’t.
He caught himself and pulled back.
Reading a stranger’s whole history off her shoulders was a thing his kind could do and mostly shouldn’t.
But he’d already caught the last of it, fainter, right at the bottom where a person keeps the things they don’t look at directly.
Tired.
Not the tired of a long shift.
The tired of someone holding something up alone for a very long time, who’d stopped believing anyone would come to take a corner of it.
He knew that one.
Falkin realized his hand had come up to the cuff—not to raise the resistance, but the opposite. An instinct he had not obeyed in years.
He wanted to lower it. He wanted, for one absurd unprofessional heartbeat, to take the dampeners off and feel her clearly.
This stranger across a fountain.
To gather all the details he could, know her. In the most empathic way possible.
He did not do it. Of course he did not do it.
A man of Vorjan House did not disrobe his own mind in an intake lobby because a human fixed a cart.
But he didn’t look away, either.
She’d hitched the canvas bag higher on her shoulder and was cutting across the floor toward the freight lifts.
Even the way she moved was efficient. No wasted motion, a straight line through a room full of drifting people, someone with somewhere to be and a habit of being early to it.
Brown hair pulled back and coming loose. That smear on her sleeve.
A face he’d have called ordinary, if ordinary meant anything. Did it, at this exact moment? He was fairly sure it didn’t.
Who taught you to hold that load you carry inside? he thought, at the back of her. And how long ago?
The lift took her. The doors closed on the loose hair and the canvas bag and the warmth-over-brace.
The concourse noise rushed back in to fill the space where he’d been paying attention to one thing instead of forty.
Falkin let out a breath he had not been aware of holding.
What, he asked himself, quite reasonably, was that?
He had no answer.
He had a mission, a bet, an application filed in an agency’s system, and a match waiting somewhere in this station whose name he would learn tomorrow.
He had no business at all standing by a fountain studying the private weather of a woman who’d never once glanced his way.
She hadn’t. That was the other thing, and it landed oddly clean. She hadn’t looked at him.
In a lobby like this, beings routinely stopped and stared at a Dalgurian in blue-and-gold armor. He could feel the small ripple of looks moving through the crowd around him like it always did, curiosity and unease braided together.
She had crouched down over a broken cart eight paces from him and never once noticed he was there.
Did he mind? He found, to his own mild bafflement, that he did not. That in fact he’d liked being, for those ten seconds, a large thing standing off to the side of something more interesting.
Enough, he told himself again, and this time made himself move.
He crossed to the lift bank. Rode up alone. Found his assigned quarters.
Grey, standard, station-issue, walls the exact featureless color of every other wall he’d ever been given.
He stood in the doorway a moment and thought, unbidden, of white walls on Vorjan’s world with nothing on them.
He felt only the shape of a want he couldn’t name.
He set his pack down. Pressed the cuff. Lowered the resistance a notch, now that the flood was behind a door, and let the quiet of an empty room settle.
For a while he just stood in it.
The quiet was the reward at the end of every day for a man built like him. The moment the noise of everyone else’s living blessedly stopped, and there was only his own small dull manageable weather to feel.
He’d spent a great many nights alone in this kind of grey room, on stations and ships and a white house with nothing on the walls.
He’d told himself for years that he preferred it. That a warrior who felt everyone’s everything all day had earned the right to feel no one’s anything at all by night.
Tonight the quiet felt less like a reward and more like… the empty house.
He noticed that. He didn’t much like noticing it.
But behind his eyes, when he closed them, was a woman crouched over a cart, finding the fault with one sure hand.
Tomorrow, he told himself. The match tomorrow. Keep your order.
He kept his order. He was very good at keeping his order.
He fell asleep still thinking about the brace under the warmth.
How could he have suspected? The agency held her name. He was a soldier and not a poet, and the note had never struck.
He did not once suspect that he’d already met her.