Azyr: Drifting for His Mate

Chapter 1

Astoria

I sat frozen and let the coffee go cold in my hand.

The Earth Liaison Office opened at nine.

I had eighteen minutes before Priya came in with the intake binders, and I spent the first four doing nothing at all, which was not like me.

The radiator ticked. Gray, wet light fell across the windowsill garden: basil going leggy, a rosemary I’d had longer than the lease, three kinds of thyme in a chipped enamel tray.

On the wall to my left were the photographs.

Twelve of them now, in mismatched frames I bought one at a time from the shop on Alberta, because it had felt wrong to line them up in identical black rectangles.

I’d sat across from twelve people, guiding them through the disclosure packet, answering their impossible questions—“What if I hate it?” “What if he’s cruel?

” “What if I get there and realize I’ve made the worst mistake imaginable?

”—and ultimately, seeing them off at the transit hub.

We’d hug, and they’d be sent off into a sky that wouldn’t return them on any meaningful timeline for those they left behind.

Marisol, who cried the whole way there and laughed the whole way through security.

The Nguyen sisters, matched to a pair of siblings on a water world, who made me promise to eat at the Vietnamese place by the airport on their behalf once a year, and I did.

Twelve faces. I was good at those faces.

I was the best in the region at the exact moment those faces needed someone to be good, just before they walked away forever.

In fact, I was so good at the goodbye that I had stopped noticing it was the only part of the process I ever did.

The message thread pinged.

A colleague from the Seattle office: did you see the funny one that came through overnight lol, small world.

And I understood, with a lurch, that my match was already circulating as a curiosity.

Of course it was. It was the kind of joke the people who worked here couldn’t help.

The woman who ran the Portland intake, matched.

The one who wrote the counseling scripts, sitting on the other side of the desk for once.

Ha, I typed back. Small world.

I didn’t say anything else. I put the phone face down, and it sat there, impossible to ignore.

Four years ago I’d registered, in my second month at the reformed agency.

At an all-staff meeting about transparency and consent, I’d decided I could hardly counsel people through registration without being willing to put my own name in the machine.

So I ticked the box, uploaded the sample, and signed the disclosure I had nearly memorized.

Then I went to lunch. I remembered the gesture better than the possibility I’d signed up for.

The machine had not gone on. It had kept my name in it the whole time, and this morning it had returned a result.

I opened the file and told myself I was opening it professionally, the way I opened everyone’s, and there was even a version of that which was true. I did want to see the results, even though I already knew what I was going to do about it.

Azyr.

One name, the way some of them came. Veyathi.

I had processed one other Veyathi, years ago, a quiet man matched to a marine biologist from Astoria (the town, not me, though the coincidence had made the biologist laugh), and I remembered the species notes…

a tidally locked homeworld, a people from the band of permanent twilight, a physiology that shifted with the light.

Survey Corps. Cartographer, Intergalactic Survey Corps.

Eleven charted systems. And then the line that did something to the back of my throat: under current residence, where every human file listed an apartment, a house, or, once, heartbreakingly, a shelter, his file said none on record: Survey vessel, itinerant.

No fixed address. A man with nothing in his file that had ever held still. He was essentially a nomadic alien. The complete opposite of me.

I wasn’t superstitious. I’d read the technical papers and sat through the briefings. Compatibility wasn’t fate; I had said those exact words to frightened people in this chair.

Still, the joke landed. Ninety-one point three percent, the highest result I’d seen at this desk, and it belonged to a man who never stayed anywhere long enough to get his mail.

Did Veyathi even get mail? Electronic communication, obviously.

But if either species had snails delivering it, my money was on his. I laughed once, alone in the office.

I looked back at his file. Twelve years in the same apartment.

The same six blocks, the same route to the office, the same tray of thyme moved from windowsill to windowsill exactly once, when I switched rooms when the Portland office stopped renting office space and started working from home. Even that had felt like an upheaval.

I thought about David then, which I didn't usually let myself do at work.

I thought about the particular quiet of the apartment the year I was twenty-eight, the way he had gotten smaller and smaller inside our life while I was busy, genuinely, generously busy, helping everyone else hold theirs together.

That year, I was in graduate school for social work.

I was good at it already… the monotony of ordinary life.

I held space for my cohort, my clients, and the woman down the hall going through a divorce.

Just like now, I came home each night feeling accomplished for having been useful.

Except I didn’t notice that the man I lived with had stopped putting his half of anything in.

He left on a Tuesday, quietly, while I was at a study group I didn't need to be at but was deep into some new theory. The part I never got over wasn’t that he left.

It was that nothing about it was dramatic enough to grab onto…

just an absence where a person had been, one I only understood the size of slowly, by how often I reached for him out of habit and found nothing there.

After David, I told myself I was too busy with work and study for another relationship. It was a useful explanation. Nobody asked what I was afraid of.

I had built a different life after that. I chose the apartment for the light, the work for its purpose, and the garden for the daily proof that something grew when I stayed to tend it. I loved that life. It was not a consolation prize. Wanting more felt dangerously close to calling it one.

So I knew what I was going to do before I admitted I knew it.

I clicked through to the response screen.

I had built this screen too. There was a green field and a gray field, Proceed to Introduction and Decline Match, and beneath them a line of small text I had fought the compliance team to keep human: Your decision is yours.

It will be recorded and honored, and it does not close any door you may wish to open later.

I remembered writing that. I remembered thinking about the woman it was for (some future frightened person, hovering) and being proud of it, of the care in it.

Reading it now, about myself, it wasn’t reassurance anymore. It was daring me.

I’d like to say I deliberated. I’d like to say I weighed it, the way I would have made a client weigh it, that I asked myself the questions I asked everyone. What are you afraid of, and is the fear telling you the truth or just keeping you company? I didn’t.

I clicked Decline Match, and a soft confirmation bloomed, another thing I had written: Your decision has been recorded and will be honored.

The office went quiet around the click. Not actually. The radiator still ticked, a bus stopped outside with a hiss of brakes. But something in me loosened, and I waited for the relief.

It came, right on schedule… thin, clean, and weightless, the relief of a decision made and a door pulled shut.

Something stressful and unsure now had a finality.

I recognized it, and that was the problem, because it was from the wrong side of the desk.

I had watched this exact relief cross the faces of people who were about to make a mistake.

I had a name for it. I called it, in my own head, the fast no.

The answer that comes too fast and too smooth, that a person mistakes for clarity when it is really just the quickest way out of a hard question.

I had spent four years teaching people to distrust it.

The easy no is the one to interrogate, I told them, or some version of it, in this chair.

The no that costs you nothing to say is usually protecting something you haven’t looked at.

I had said it that very week, to Marisol’s replacement in my caseload, a woman named Tessa who was one bad night from declining a match she had told me she wanted.

I looked at the confirmation on my screen.

Recorded and will be honored. I looked at the twelve faces on the wall, all of whom had, at some point, sat where I was sitting and wanted, more than anything, to click the gray button and go home to a life that was already the right size.

Except, they’d signed up for the possibility of finding something better.

I’d signed up to show them there was nothing to be afraid of.

I picked up the watering can.

It was a small brass thing, dented, and there was maybe a swallow of water in it, not enough for anything.

I carried it to the windowsill and tipped it over the thyme, which didn’t need water.

The soil was still dark from two days ago.

I watered it anyway. Then I just stood there with the empty can in my hand and my own name still glowing on the screen behind me at ninety-one point three percent.

Trying to ignore it, I did the small useless tending things I did when I didn’t want to think, and I thought anyway.

He would have already requested first contact.

That was how the protocol worked. The off-world party filed their intent through the standard channel before a decision cleared, so that consent could be exchanged in both directions and nobody arrived unasked, which prevented the way those first women had been whisked off the planet before they understood what was happening.

Which meant that somewhere out past the gray Portland sky, a man with no fixed address had already said yes, I would like to meet her.

Right now, my decision was speeding toward him.

He would get the decline. It would be honored.

He would go back to his eleven systems and his twelfth.

I would go back to the binders, the faces, the goodbyes, the tray of thyme would grow because I stayed to make it grow, and this would be a funny story I never told.

It was almost a shame. I’d declined the highest number the desk had ever seen, before nine a.m. on a wet Tuesday.

The relief was still there. I kept checking it, waiting to see if my emotions changed.

They didn’t. I stood at the window with the empty can, watching a street where nothing was happening, and I knew exactly what I would have told a client who felt what I was feeling…

I had just done the fast no, in my own chair, about my own life, and I had not stopped to ask it a single question.

Hadn’t even considered sleeping on it before deciding.

Priya’s key turned in the front door at nine on the dot. I set the watering can down, straightened the frames that didn't need straightening, and got ready to be good at my job.