Chapter 4
brOOKLYN
She’d made the slides too good.
Brooklyn knew it the moment she pulled them up in the briefing room and saw the delegation’s faces.
Three Dalgurians and Re-lee, all four of them settling in for what they clearly expected to be a station bioengineer stumbling through some talking points.
And she thought, oh no.
Because she’d built a forty-slide deck with animated stabilization curves and a comparative microbiome map and a whole section on sample chain-of-custody that nobody in this room had asked for.
This was the problem with being handed something to do at nine at night when you couldn’t sleep anyway.
You overbuilt it.
You always overbuilt it.
Overbuilding was just worrying with a to-do list.
Too late now.
“Thank you all for coming,” she said, and started.
She was good at this part, at least. She knew the research the way she knew the shimmy in a bad bearing, from the inside, by feel.
Once she got past the first slide the nerves burned off and it was just the work. The work she could do in her sleep.
The compound. The stabilization curve. Why the synthetic analog failed and the Earth-sourced material didn’t.
She kept it clean, kept it moving, kept her hands still, and watched the room to see who was tracking.
She kept it a little cleaner, if she was honest, than the room strictly required. Because there was a low static under it she was choosing not to examine. Whatever she was explaining mattered to these people.
Mattered how? She didn’t fully have the shape of it.
Jenny had said existential once, on a call, then changed the subject.
But she’d never elaborated, and Brooklyn didn’t ask.
That wasn’t her job.
Her job was the dirt and the curve and the chain of custody. She was a very good technician of the small true thing. She left the big terrifying thing to people who liked meetings.
Still. Three Dalgurians had crossed a galaxy. For her forty slides?
Jenny had held some things back that seemed important.
Like that whole “existential” part, whatever that was.
Re-lee was tracking with her whole luminous pink face, antennae following the curves on the screen like they were a sunrise. Re-lee tracked everything that way.
Two of the guards followed with the flat professional attention of people who’d been briefed on worse in worse rooms.
And the third one watched her.
Not the slides. Her.
She’d clocked him when they walked in. How could you not? Blue hair. Blue-and-gold armor. A face doing something warm and settled that most people’s faces didn’t do at nine in the morning.
The gold in his skin caught the light when he turned his head.
Senior one, probably.
The one Jenny meant? Maybe.
Now wasn’t the time to think about that.
She noticed things.
And there was a difference between noticing a person and noticing a person. She was a professional, thank you.
But he watched her through the whole M-series section, easy and unhurried.
It wasn’t the way people usually watched her. Not evaluating. Not waiting for a mistake.
Not that narrow attention she’d spent her whole life learning to feel coming.
It was more like… listening. Like the slides were fine but she was the more interesting data set.
Stop it, she told herself, and clicked to the chain-of-custody section.
“Sample integrity is the constraint we can’t engineer around,” she said.
“The compound degrades fast once it leaves the source environment. So collection and transport are as much a part of the science as the sequencing is. I handle the Earth-side chain personally where I can. It’s—it matters that it’s done right the first time. There isn’t a second one.”
She hadn’t meant to say the last part with any weight. It just came out with weight, because it was true.
She moved on fast, the way she moved on fast from all true things.
She finished the deck. Killed the screen. Turned around.
“Questions.”
Re-lee had four, all of them delighted and none of them about the science.
One of the guards had a good one about storage volume that Brooklyn answered in numbers.
The other had none.
Then the blue-haired one spoke, for the first time. His voice was low and unhurried and formal.
She’d only ever heard that from Jenny’s calls, with Karuk in the background.
“You said there isn’t a second chance to do it right.”
“On the samples, yes. The material’s too fragile to—”
“You collect them yourself. Personally. Even the ones you could delegate.” He said it without any edge, turning it over like he was curious about the mechanism of it. “Because you don’t trust that anyone else will do it correctly. Or because it’s easier to carry it yourself than to ask.”
The room went slightly still.
Brooklyn’s hands, which had been perfectly still the whole briefing, wanted to move.
She didn’t let them.
Because that… that was not a question about samples.
That was a question about her. And it was accurate.
She gritted her teeth for a moment, because no one got to be that accurate about her, not from across a table, not on day one, not ever.
For one horrible weightless second she felt the whole braced architecture of herself get seen.
The feeling was so unfamiliar that her body didn’t have a response ready for it.
She had, however, spent thirty-one years building responses for everything.
“Both,” she said.
Light. Even.
A small professional smile that gave away exactly nothing.
“It’s more efficient. When you’re the one who knows how it’s supposed to go, it’s faster to just do it than to teach it and check it and fix it.
You’d know something about that.” She let her eyes touch the gold in his skin, the earned marks, and back up.
“House guard. I imagine you don’t delegate much either. ”
Something moved in his face.
Not surprise.
Recognition?
Warm and quiet, the look of a person who’d been handed exactly the answer they expected and liked being right about it.
“No,” he agreed. “I don’t.”
“There you go.” She turned to the room, done with it, closing it the way she closed all doors—no slam, just a click. “Anything else? I’ve got a collection window down on The Bridge at fourteen hundred and the compound doesn’t wait for me.”
There wasn’t anything else. Re-lee gushed. The good-question guard nodded. Brooklyn gathered her tablet and her canvas bag and her heart rate, which had done something undignified and was now getting back in line. She headed for the door.
He caught her in the corridor.
Of course he did.
Not aggressively. He just fell into step beside her, matching her pace without seeming to try.
Brooklyn had the passing thought that a person that size moving that quietly should probably be illegal.
“I owe you a proper introduction,” he said. “We weren’t given names in there. Falkin. Senior guard, Vorjan House. I’m the advance negotiator for the delegation.” He paused. “The briefing was excellent. Truly. You built forty slides for a room that would have accepted five.”
“You counted the slides.”
“I count most things.” The corner of his mouth moved. “I also fixed on the twelfth one that you’d done it because you couldn’t sleep and building it well was a way to stop thinking about whatever kept you up. I could be wrong.”
He was not wrong. He was so precisely not wrong that Brooklyn stopped walking for a half-step before she caught herself and kept going.
Okay. No.
We are not doing this.
Because she knew what this was. The ones who saw you clearest were the ones who could take you apart with it.
They learned where the seams were.
They learned which lever moved you, and then they pulled it, gently, and called it love.
Her mother saw her clearly. Her mother saw her clearly every single time the fourth ring came around, and every single time it cost Brooklyn a number she’d already earned.
Being seen was not safe.
Being useful was safe. Being efficient was safe.
Being a warm competent surface with the door shut behind it—that was safe. That had always been safe.
She was not going to hand it to a blue-haired stranger in a corridor because he counted slides and remembered the twelfth one.
Or because he smiled at her like the sun coming out over a place it had never bothered to shine on before.
“Brooklyn,” she said, because he’d given his name and she wasn’t rude. “Station bioengineer. Jenny’s research partner, Earth-side. I’ll be your liaison for the delegation.” Pleasant. Flat.
The exact voice she used on a stuck bearing. Six minutes, don’t make it weird. “So you’ll see plenty of me. Professionally. In meetings.”
“In meetings,” he agreed. There was no argument in it, no push. And why was that more unsettling than a push would have been?
He just… accepted it. Set it down where she put it, like it was allowed.
“I’ve got a collection window,” she said.
“You mentioned. The compound doesn’t wait.”
“It really doesn’t.” They’d reached the lift bank. She hit the call panel a little harder than necessary. “Welcome to Libra Station, Falkin. Someone will send you the schedule for tomorrow.”
The lift opened. She stepped in. Turned around.
He was standing exactly where she’d left him, hands loose at his sides. Watching her with that same warm, unhurried posture, like he had all the time in the galaxy and had decided to spend some of it here.
And he did not say anything clever, and he did not try to hold the door, and he did not do one of the things that would have let her feel justified.
He just inclined his head. “Brooklyn.”
The doors closed.
And Brooklyn stood in the lift going down and let out a breath. She pressed the heel of her hand flat against her sternum, once, the way she did. And thought, in the pleasant flat efficient voice she used for closing things:
Nope.
She had a collection window. She had a compound that didn’t wait. She had a brother in a book and a mother on a fourth ring and a flat beautiful line on a screen two decks down.
That line was hers and only hers.
It could not be counted, or seen, or taken apart with a smile.
She fixed her eyes on the descending numbers and did not think about blue hair.
She was very good at not thinking about things.