Chapter 7
FALKIN
He’d meant to do it in order.
That was the thing Falkin kept coming back to, standing outside the lab with his hand not quite raised to the panel.
He did everything in order. Order was the discipline that had gotten him through worse than a conversation.
There was a correct sequence.
Establish trust.
Let her rhythms settle around his presence.
Let the thing between them get solid enough underfoot to hold weight.
Telling her about the match belonged near the end of that sequence, not the middle.
But she’d stood in that briefing room three days ago holding a tablet she didn’t need, with the emotional door she was always shutting nowhere she could find it.
She’d looked at him like a person who’d caught herself hoping and hated that she had.
And every day since, he’d felt it through the cuff whenever they were in a room together.
The warmth reaching for him a half-second before the brace slammed it back down.
Over and over.
A small private war she didn’t know she was losing in front of the one being in the galaxy built to feel it.
She was falling too.
He could feel it.
And she was fighting it alone, in the dark, with no idea there was a certificate in an agency’s system that said she wasn’t wrong to.
That was the part he couldn’t leave sitting.
Because he knew what it was to fall toward someone while believing there was nothing behind you worth turning for.
He’d done it his whole life. Toward Vorjan House, toward Karuk, toward the crooked drawing on a wall. Braced the entire way for it to be taken.
She had the right to know she wasn’t alone in the dark, even if knowing it made her run.
Even if it cost him.
Do it honestly, he told himself. Not to close her. To free her. There was a difference, and if he couldn’t feel it he shouldn’t say a word. He could feel it.
He stood there anyway, hand not quite raised, longer than a man of Vorjan House should need to stand outside a door.
Because under the certainty was a cold small doubt he’d been outrunning since the cafeteria.
What if you’re the one who’s wrong?
Not the agency. Him. What if the flood at the fountain was just a lonely man’s own weather… read back to him as hers?
He’d spent nineteen dutiful years being certain of things that were true. He had never once staked his heart on one.
Standing here, he didn’t know. Was his certainty a compass, or just the direction he wanted north to be?
And if he was wrong? He didn’t lose a negotiation.
He lost the one thing he’d crossed a galaxy to reach, and he’d have done it with his own hand.
He’d never had this much to lose.
It was the first time in his life the wanting had come with a price tag he could read.
He pressed the panel.
She let him in because she assumed it was about the freight manifest.
“If it’s the temp logs, I already flagged the two anomalies,” she said, not looking up from the sequencer, hands moving.
The chili-string of little solar lights burned red along the shelf above her, ridiculous and warm.
There were sticky notes in three colors and a mug going cold and more of herself on display in this room than she’d never once put on display in a meeting.
He understood, standing in it, that he was being allowed somewhere.
Did she realize she’d allowed it? Probably not.
She’d been too busy assuming this was about work. “Both were transport-side, both within tolerance, nothing lost. The lane’s working. Tell your logistics person they did fine.”
“It’s not the logs.”
Something in his voice made her look up.
He watched her read it.
She was good at reading, in her way. Not empathic but observant, a person who’d learned young to clock the weather in a face and read it fast and read it right.
She read it’s not the logs and set down the rack in her hands the way you set down something that breaks.
Her emotional walls came up so fast and so complete that he felt them hit the cuff like a shutter.
“Okay,” she said. Even. “What is it.”
“May I sit.”
“You can stand or sit, I can’t stop a guard from doing either.” But she gestured at the stool by the bench, and he took it.
Sitting made him smaller in the room, and she needed him smaller for this.
He’d considered all the angles of this conversation.
All but one.
The wager had come up in him on the walk here, the way a stone comes up under a plough. Tell her that too?
No. The match was the truth about her. The wager was the truth about him—a box he’d built so he’d have somewhere to put his own wanting—and she did not need his box tonight. She needed the one fact that was hers.
A week, then. When the ground under this was solid enough to stand on.
He set it down where he set everything he wasn’t ready to bring into a room, and did not look at it again.
“I’m going to tell you something,” Falkin said, “and I want to clarify first, because I don’t want it to be taken wrong.”
He kept his hands loose on his knees.
Kept his voice low and unhurried, borrowing her own trick. The flat even one she used on a stuck bearing when she leaned in close and told it not to make things weird.
“It’s not bad news. It’s not about the talks. Nothing is wrong. And I’m not asking you to do anything, or decide anything, or say anything back. You can throw me out when I’m done and nothing changes. I need you to hear that part before the rest.”
He felt the brace hold and the warmth go still behind it, wary, listening.
She didn’t fill the silence. That was new. She usually filled silences, deflected into them, kept them from becoming a thing.
She watched him, and waited.
She’s braver than she thinks, he thought. She just aims it all at the wrong things.
“Before I left Vorjan’s world,” he said, “I submitted an application to the Intergalactic Dating Agency.”
Nothing moved in her face. That was how he knew it had landed—the too-perfect stillness of a person holding very hard.
“I know how the agency works,” she said, careful. “Everyone on this station knows how the agency works. That’s—that’s not news, Falkin, half the delegation probably—”
“Brooklyn.”
She stopped.
“The match came through,” he said. “Four days ago. During the session about collection volume. You picked up your coffee twice that morning.”
A breath.
He kept his eyes on hers and did not soften it into anything but the plain true thing.
She deserved to hear the full truth with nothing in it at all.
“It’s you. The agency matched me to you.
I’d already… I’d already known, I think, before the file.
I stopped in the intake lobby the day I arrived because a woman was fixing a broken cart and I couldn’t look away.
I didn’t have your name yet. Then four days ago an agency put your name on a certificate against mine and I felt like the galaxy had finally told me something I already knew. ”
Something crossed her face he couldn’t place. Not shock. Later than shock. Recognition arriving badly, out of order.
Her eyes went to the comm on the bench. One second. Then back to him.
She didn’t pick it up.
The lab was very quiet. The sequencer hummed. The red lights burned.
He watched her face do several things at once.
He’d known it would.
He’d braced for it.
Shock cracked the stillness.
Up through the crack came a flare so bright and so brief he almost missed it even reaching for it.
The thing at the very bottom that she never looked at directly.
Wanted.
Chosen.
Someone came.
Luminous and terrified and gone in less than a heartbeat.
It hit the cuff. He had to press two fingers to the gold to keep his own weather from answering it out loud.
And then her emotional door.
He watched the door come for it.
Watched the warmth-over-brace configuration he’d recognized across a fountain snap into place around that bright terrible flare of hope.
Watched her put it away the way she put everything away.
Fast and practiced.
Seated and shimmed and shut.
A thing that bright was a thing that could be taken. She had learned that everything bright got taken. Where? Somewhere, a long time ago.
He did not chase it. That was the discipline.
Regardless how much he wanted to move forward.
To her.
“So,” she said. Her voice had gone very level, very pleasant.
The voice that fixed centrifuges and closed doors without slamming them.
He felt the cost of that levelness like a hand on his own throat.
“The dating agency matched us,” she said, like how she answered a question that she had to be nice about.
She was using that face.
He was starting to hate that face.
“Yes.”
“And you’re telling me this because—”
“Because you’re falling toward me and fighting it alone in the dark,” Falkin said, quietly, “and I didn’t think that was fair when I already had the information. That’s all.”
“Okay.”
He continued. “You have a right to know you’re not being a fool. You’re not a fool. Whatever you’re feeling, an algorithm that crossed a galaxy agrees with it, and I agreed with it first, and you should get to have that fact even if you do nothing with it.”
Her jaw worked.
Once.
“You don’t know what I’m feeling,” she said.
“I do, actually.” He said it gently, no triumph in it, the plainest thing he’d said. “That’s the one part I can’t turn off. But I would never use it against you, and I’ll spend as long as it takes proving that, and I’m not asking you to believe it today.”
She stood up.
To throw him out?
He’d felt that coming, and it wasn’t that.
Instead she went to the sample fridge and reseated a rack that didn’t need reseating and lined up three labels so they all faced the same way.
He understood exactly what he was watching.
A woman reaching for the small fixable thing because the large one had just walked into her lab and told her she was wanted.
Small fixable things were the only place she’d ever been safe.
“I have a lot of work,” she said, to the fridge.
“I know.”
“I’m not—I can’t do this today. Whatever this is. I have a manifest and a collection window and a—” her voice caught, and she killed it, sealed it, kept going “—and I can’t.”
“I’m not asking you to do it today.” Falkin stood, slow, and made himself keep the distance.
The one thing he could give her right now was room. “I told you at the start. Nothing has to change. Throw me out and nothing changes. I only wanted you to have the information.”
She didn’t throw him out. She stood at the open fridge with her back to him and her hand flat on a rack.
He could feel it all pouring off her, unfiltered by anything but the cuff.
The shock, the terror, the bright buried want.
And threaded all the way through it, oldest and deepest and worst, the disbelief.
Not “Is this real?”
Underneath that.
“Why would it be?”
“Why would anyone?”
“What do you actually want?”
“And how much is it going to cost me when I find out?”
He didn’t answer it.
She hadn’t said it out loud, and answering the things she hadn’t said out loud was the seeing that would send her running for good.
So he let her have it.
He let her stand in her warm colorful lab under her ridiculous red lights and feel the whole flood of it without one word from him to manage on top of it.
“Take the time you need,” he said, at the door. “All of it. I’ll still be at the talks in the morning. The chair’s the right one now—you don’t have to worry about your back.” A beat, and he let the corner of his mouth move.
She needed one small thing that wasn’t heavy.
“I’ll be efficient about it.”
She made a sound that was almost a laugh and almost not.
She didn’t turn around.
He hadn’t expected her to. He’d learned that she never looked back, and that it wasn’t coldness.
He’d decided, standing in a corridor watching a lift take her name away from him, that he was going to be a thing worth turning for eventually.
However long eventually took.
He’d earn it the way he earned everything.
In order, on service, one seated shim at a time.
He let himself out.
Pressed the cuff. Lowered it a notch in the quiet of the corridor.
Behind him, through the lab door, he felt a woman standing very still at an open fridge, holding a rack she didn’t need.
The light on at last.
No idea yet what to do with being able to see.
There you are, he thought, one more time, warm and certain and unhurried.
I’m not going anywhere.