Chapter 5
FALKIN
Falkin watched the lift take her down.
He hadn’t moved. He’d introduced himself, said not one true thing more than the two he’d let slip. She’d shut every single one down clean and walked into the lift without a backward glance.
He’d felt it building the whole way down the corridor. The warmth pulling in behind the brace. The practiced clean click of a woman locking herself somewhere he wasn’t invited.
She’d done it beautifully.
How many times had she done it before?
A thousand?
He should have minded, shouldn’t he?
It was a closed door.
Hadn’t he crossed a void to find an open one?
Instead, he stood in the empty corridor, under the fading residue of her.
The warmth. The brace.
The small, startled flare when he’d seen too much and she’d known it.
His breath went slow and his pulse went sure. The same low certainty that had taken him once before, in front of a crooked drawing on a wall.
There she is, he thought.
He pressed the cuff, lowered it a notch, and let himself feel it clearly.
He didn’t care what any report said or any dating database.
He knew.
Brooklyn was there for him.
By the fourth day of negotiations, Falkin knew what Brooklyn’s coffee meant.
She kept a cup with her in every meeting, and she never drank it.
If the cup sat untouched at her elbow going cold, the talks were going well. Her mind was three moves ahead of the table.
If she picked it up, the room had said something that mattered to her. She needed the two seconds it bought to decide how much of her face to let it reach.
She’d picked it up twice this morning.
Once when the counsel mentioned expanding the collection sites Earth-side.
And once when Re-lee, radiant and helpful and entirely without malice, had said the word export in front of a room that had not yet agreed the compound could be exported at all.
He marked both, the way you mark the two places a floor creaks.
He was learning everything about her, taking in every detail.
“—which brings us to volume,” the counsel was saying, a broad grey being from a world Falkin had never visited, “and here I confess our estimates and yours diverge considerably.”
“They diverge because your estimates assume you can scale collection like manufacturing,” Brooklyn said.
Even. Pleasant. The centrifuge voice, he’d started calling it privately, the one that fixed things while telling them not to make it weird.
“You can’t. The compound degrades the moment it leaves the source environment.
You could put a thousand collectors on the ground tomorrow and you’d triple your spoilage, not your yield.
The constraint isn’t labor. It’s chemistry, and chemistry doesn’t negotiate. ”
“So, the constraint is you,” the counsel said, not unkindly.
“The constraint is the process,” Brooklyn corrected. “I’m just currently the person who knows it.”
Currently. Falkin heard the word land and go past everyone else in the room.
She’d said it lightly, the way she said all the true things. Only he caught the small weight that came in under it through the cuff. A flicker, quickly folded away, the shape of someone braced to hold a thing up alone until it broke or somebody took it.
Where had she learned that? He couldn’t have said. He only felt that she had… and long ago.
He pressed the cuff. Lowered it half a notch, which he had no business doing in a working room, and felt her clearly for the space of one breath.
Warmth. Focus. And under it, the brace. Always the brace.
He raised the resistance again before it could become a habit he’d have to explain.
The counsel wanted numbers. Brooklyn gave him numbers. She gave him better numbers than he’d asked for, ranges instead of points, spoilage curves against transport time. Falkin watched the grey being’s frustration thin out into something closer to respect.
It struck him, not for the first time, that Vorjan House had sent three guards to broker this deal.
And the whole of it turned on one tired human who fixed luggage carts for strangers and didn’t drink her coffee.
The counsel’s aide leaned in and murmured, and the counsel’s face did a small careful thing before he spoke again.
“One more item for the record. There is a committee, Earth-side—a trade oversight body—asking publicly why so much of the planet’s biological material is moving toward a foreign power.
” He said foreign power like a phrase he’d been handed and didn’t love.
“It is noise, for now. But it’s getting louder, and there’s a name behind it now, which is when noise stops being noise. ”
Brooklyn picked up her coffee. Set it down without drinking.
“We’ll break there,” said the counsel, “and reconvene after the meal interval.”
Chairs scraped. The room emptied in the loose grateful way rooms empty.
Brooklyn stayed to shut down her display, because of course she did. Falkin found a reason to be slow gathering his own things.
He could admit it, under the cuff, where he kept the things he didn’t say. He had started arranging his days so that he was slow whenever she was.
“You argue well,” he said.
“I don’t argue. I explain until people stop being wrong.” She didn’t look up from the display. “It’s more efficient.”
“You say that word a great deal.”
“It’s a great word.” She killed the screen.
Turned. Found him closer than she’d expected.
Not close, he’d been careful, but closer.
Her gaze assessed him, like it always did, and she shifted.
Not away, exactly. Just more protective.
“Efficient means nobody has to do the thing twice. I like nobody having to do the thing twice.”
“Because doing it twice means someone did it wrong the first time.”
“Because doing it twice is a waste of a perfectly good first time.” A beat. That guarded flicker, the door testing its own frame. “You do the thing again.”
“What thing?”
“The thing where you answer a question I didn’t ask.” She hitched the canvas bag onto her shoulder. “I’m going to eat something that isn’t from a machine. Professionally. Alone.”
He took it for an opening.
Professionally alone.
Wasn’t that what a person said when they wanted to be talked out of the alone?
It was the read a confident man made, and he was a confident man, and he almost stepped into it. Almost said I could eat professionally in the same room.
Then he looked at her face, which was doing none of the things the flicker had promised, and understood he’d gotten it backward.
What he’d thought was an invitation, he realized, absolutely was not.
She didn’t want to be talked out of it.
She wanted it respected so she could stop bracing to defend it.
The cuff had handed him the feeling.
He’d translated it into what he wanted it to mean.
He adjusted and set the almost-words down where they belonged, which was nowhere.
“Understood,” Falkin said, and meant it this time. He had the smaller, truer pleasure of watching the lack of a fight unsettle her more than a fight would have.
She left. She didn’t look back.
He was learning that she never looked back, and that it wasn’t coldness. Looking back was a thing you did when you thought there might be something behind you worth turning for. She’d taught herself, somewhere, a long time ago, that there wasn’t.
Currently, he thought. We’ll see about currently.
The message from the agency came while he was standing in a food line pretending to read a menu board.
He felt it before he saw it. Absurd, because it was a comm chime and not a feeling.
But his whole body had been braced for this since the transport cleared the docking ring.
When the tone sounded, the three-note cascade Re-lee had assigned to agency business, sweet and formal, his hands went still on the tray.
The whole of him went quiet.
He stepped out of the line. Found a stretch of wall with no one against it. Opened the message.
INTERGALACTIC DATING AGENCY—MATCH CONFIRMATION
Applicant: Falkin, Vorjan House.
Compatibility threshold exceeded. Match located within your current locale.
Matched: Brooklyn. Station bioengineer, Libra Station.
He read it three times.
The first time, nothing.
The words arrived and did not connect, the way a blow you’ve braced for sometimes doesn’t hurt until later.
Matched: Brooklyn.
A name in an agency’s clean grey letters. He knew that name. He’d said it into a corridor five days ago and watched a lift take it away from him.
The second time, it connected.
It hit the way the surf hit when the doors first opened—all at once, no filter fast enough.
It was her.
The woman crouched over a broken cart. The warmth over the brace, the tired at the bottom he’d recognized because he lived in a version of it.
The algorithm he’d handed his heart to had reached across a galaxy and put its blind hand down on the exact person he had already begun to fall toward. Without permission. Without a single rational reason.
The note struck after all, he thought. I just hadn’t been told the key.
He pressed the cuff hard. His own weather had come up so fast it was drowning out the crowd’s, which had not happened to him in years.
He stood against the wall of a station cafeteria and felt, for one undignified moment, exactly like the humans he’d spent his life reading from a safe distance. Flooded and transparent, moved past the reach of the hardware.
Then, being who he was, he made himself think.
She didn’t know.
That was the fact under the flood, and it mattered more than the flood.
The agency held the match until it chose to reveal it, some ceremony to it. Re-lee had said so, three messages’ worth of radiance. Had it told her too? He had no way to know, and no way to ask that wasn’t telling her himself.
Where was she now? Somewhere in this station, eating something that wasn’t from a machine, professionally, alone. With no idea that the blue-haired guard who counted her slides had just been handed her name on a certificate.
Tell her now? Tonight? Cross the station and lay the whole thing out?
And she would run.
He knew it the way she knew the shimmy in a bad bearing. He’d felt her recalibrate the distance in an empty room over the crime of him standing a half-pace too close.
A woman who’d taught herself there was nothing behind her worth turning for did not get handed you were selected for me by an intergalactic algorithm and lean into it.
It would be one more thing someone wanted from her. She would shut the door on it with the clean practiced click he’d already heard her use, and she would mean it.
He would not do that to it. To her. To the small foolish, reckless thing he’d carried across the void.
Not yet. Not like this.
Do it properly, he told himself. In order. The way you do everything.
He closed the message. Pressed the resistance back up until he had something like calm.
And went and bought food he didn’t taste, because the mission was still the mission. A man of Vorjan House did not let the galaxy see the cost of anything, especially not the good things.
Aldric’s face resolved on the comm looking exactly as Falkin had left it. White hair, amber eyes, the wry almost-smile that a stranger would miss and that Falkin had learned to read like weather.
Behind him, the training yard on Vorjan’s world, purple going into the light. He’d caught the last of the day there. Falkin had woken to a station morning. The distance never stopped being strange.
“You look pleased with yourself,” Aldric said. “That’s rarely good.”
“The talks are progressing.”
“I don’t care about the talks.” Aldric set down whatever he’d been holding. A blade? Probably. He was always cleaning a blade he didn’t need to clean. “You know why I answered. Say it, so we can both pretend I asked out of politeness.”
Falkin let the small knowing smile come, because it was earned. “The match came through.”
Silence on the line. Amber eyes going still.
“And?” Aldric said.
“And she’s here. On the station. I’d already…
met her.” He chose the words. Chose to give Aldric less than everything, because everything belonged to a corridor and a fountain and a woman who didn’t know yet, and it was not Aldric’s to hold.
“Before the file. I met her first, and then the file confirmed her. The agency put its hand down on the exact person I’d have chosen if it had let me choose. ”
“How convenient,” Aldric said, flat, “for the man who wanted so badly to believe.”
“You think I arranged it.”
“I think you’re a romantic wearing a soldier’s face, and I think romantics find what they came to find.
” Aldric picked the blade back up. Cleaned it.
“It proves nothing, Falkin. A machine matched you to a lonely woman on a station full of lonely women. Karuk got lucky. You’ve talked yourself into luck.
There’s a difference, and you’ll learn it around the time the shine comes off. ”
“You’ll learn something too.”
“Will I.”
“When I win.” Falkin said it easily, the way you say a thing you’ve stopped doubting.
“You set the terms yourself. A mate just like him. I’ve found her.
When it holds—and it will hold—you file your application and you come, and you go through the process, honestly, the full window, the way honor requires. ”
Something crossed Aldric’s face. Not the almost-smile. Underneath it… the thing the almost-smile existed to cover. And it was not amusement.
“I’ll come,” Aldric said. Quiet. Controlled. “If you win, I’ll come, and I’ll stand in that ridiculous glowing lobby and let a pink administrator match me to some human who deserves better, because I said the words and a man of this house doesn’t unsay them.”
Falkin nodded.
Aldric looked directly into the comm. “But understand me. You’re not doing me a kindness.
You think you’re pulling me toward what you found.
You’re pulling me toward the one thing I’ve spent a very long time making certain never happens again.
” A beat. “So, win carefully. Because if you win, you hand me a door I welded shut for good reason. And I will remember who opened it.”
The line held that for a moment, cold and even.
Then the almost-smile came back, deliberate, a curtain drawn over a lit window. “The talks are progressing,” Aldric said dryly. “Do try not to lose Earth. Vorjan House would notice.”
The comm went dark.
Falkin sat in his grey quarters with the residue of it. His oldest friend’s controlled dread, sharp enough to reach him across the light-years the cuff could never quite dampen.
He thought about welded doors, and empty white houses, and a woman two decks away who didn’t know her name was on a certificate.
He didn’t much like knowing he’d frightened Aldric.
Could Aldric still be frightened? He hadn’t thought so.
But under it, unkillable, warm, certain, was the other thing. The thing that had turned over looking at a crooked drawing on a wall.
She’s mine, he thought. The machine says so. I said so first.
He pressed the cuff. Lowered it a notch. And for the first time in a very long time, sat alone in a grey room and did not feel alone in it.