Chapter 3
Astoria
I knew who it was before I opened the door, and I opened it anyway, because self-preservation has never once been my strong suit.
Four days after the decline. Four days of telling exactly nobody, of answering Priya's raised eyebrow with a stack of transit forms, of watering the thyme on schedule, of sleeping like garbage, and deciding every single morning that the whole thing was finished.
The system recorded my no. The system honored my no.
I built the part of the system that honored the no.
So when the knock came at the end of the day…
low, even, two taps and a pause then nothing.
I told myself it must be a courier and went to the door with my cardigan sliding off one shoulder and my reading glasses shoved up into my hair.
He filled the whole frame of it.
I spent a long time afterward trying to describe him and getting it wrong every time.
Tall, sure, but that wasn't it. The thing was that his edges wouldn't hold still.
In the wet gray coming off the street he was the color of almost nothing, pale blue washing out to clear at the shoulders and the backs of his hands.
Where my hallway light caught him he darkened, a blue that welled up and sank back before it could spread.
He was holding a Survey Corps scanner loose in a hand that had plainly forgotten it was there.
I knew what it was because I'd read his species file multiple times every day and then tried very hard to forget I owned it.
“Astoria Wellington.” The way he said my name made me forget the sentence I had prepared.
“You’re Azyr.” My voice stayed professional. The rest of me was having considerable difficulty.
He tipped his head. Then he said something, and the translator at his collar caught it a half-second late, and what it handed me, in a mild machine contralto, was:
“I have wanted to be inside you since the first document.”
We both went very still.
Here was a fun fact about my job. I had been in the room for every flavor of first-contact malfunction there was.
The mangled hellos. The accidental proposals.
One time a Kthari elder's formal proposal came out of the box as an order for two dozen eggs, and I had to keep a straight face while an excited human got offered breakfast.
I had a whole calm register for exactly this situation.
And I stood in my own doorway at the end of a long wet day and couldn't find it with both hands and a map.
My face was hot. He watched me with the polite, total attention of a man who didn't understand my reaction but planned to remember it forever.
Which was, honestly, worse. Or better. I couldn't tell which.
Years of professional composure, and here I was doing an impression of a woman who had never once heard a sentence before.
“The unit is.” He stopped. Touched the collar.
When he spoke again he'd slowed way down, spacing every word out, feeding the machine as little as he could to ruin.
“The unit renders my grammar poorly. I said, I have wanted to meet you. Since I read the document your office wrote. The intake philosophy.” A pause.
“Not.” Another one. “Not the other thing.”
“I got the other thing.”
“Yes.”
“Loudly.”
“Yes.” His face twitched at the corner of his mouth that on a human I'd have filed under mortified, and along the backs of his hands the blue ticked up half a shade.
I noticed it. Then I shoved the observation somewhere I didn't want to look and slammed the lid.
I'd met his species before. The creeping color meant something…
something I didn't have the capacity to handle right now.
I'd already declined his match, so his happy color change didn't matter.
Then I did my thing, because it was the only thing I had left.
I was a professional, so I put on my little professional hat and took over the situation.
I put a hand on the doorframe, which set my body across the gap in a way that wasn't quite a welcome, and I used the same matter-of-fact voice I always used when I thought someone would listen the first time.
“Okay. Azyr. I'm going to be straight with you, because I'd want somebody to be straight with me. You came through the standard first-contact protocol, and that protocol is real, and I honor it. But I declined the match. Four days ago. It should have hit your channel.”
“I didn't receive it.” He looked down at the scanner. “My request cleared before I left transit range.” When he looked back at me, the blue had faded from his hands. “I understand. I will not ask you to change your decision.”
Standing in my doorway with my glasses in my hair like an idiot, I realized that there was nobody to hand him to.
The reformed IDA ran a one-month introduction window for every arriving match, a window I helped write, built specifically so no human ever again got rushed off the planet the way the first ones were.
It needed an Earth Liaison Officer, and there was exactly one in the Pacific Northwest since Eugene closed.
Me. My no still stood. What remained was visitor orientation and departure paperwork, not a month in which I owed him another answer.
I could run the administrative part without reopening the match.
I intended to be very good at that distinction.
Cosmic. Really. Ten out of ten, no notes.
Competence is a cage with very comfortable bars.
I was the only officer, which meant I was the safest possible person to hand a matched alien to, which also meant I was the only person who couldn't hand him off.
Except in the rare occasion an alien became too much and needed to be removed from the planet, but that hadn't happened yet.
I'd built that safety myself. Made myself indispensable, so I'd never be dispensable. And now I'd been served my own dish.
I thought about calling Ruth. She was retired now, mostly, up in the San Juans with a garden that puts mine to shame.
She rarely answered her phone, and she'd have laughed at me, the good laugh, and then said something to put me in my place so I could handle the situation.
I didn't call Ruth. Her voice in my mind was enough for me to sigh and take over.
“Come in out of the wet,” I said. “We've got things to sort out, and I'm not doing it on the step.”
He crossed the threshold, and the hallway light caught him just right.
For one full second he went a deep living blue, the entire length of him, before he seemed to feel it happen and let it drain back toward gray.
Then he took in my hallway all at once, the coat hooks, the crack in the plaster, the little herbs on the sill through the kitchen door, and I got the deeply unsettling sense that he could've redrawn the whole office from memory an hour later, down to the mug I left out.
“You water them in the morning.” His eyes were on the herbs. “The soil's wet on top and dry underneath. You did it today. It didn't need it.”
“That's a weird thing to notice about a woman you've known ninety seconds.”
“I notice everything.” I couldn't tell if that was an apology or a warning. “I have not yet learned how to do it less.”
“Great,” I said. “Cool. No pressure.”
I put the kettle on, mostly so my hands had a job, and I turned my back on him to do it, which felt braver than it was, given that he could apparently redraw the room from memory whether he was looking at it or not.
“So here's how this works.” I stayed facing the kettle. “It's a formality. The match is declined. It stays declined, that part is not up for negotiation. I want to be really clear about that.”
“Understood,” he said.
“The orientation window is a courtesy to an arriving visitor. It does not reopen a declined match. You can end it early; I can end a session. We keep the paperwork separate from whatever either of us wants.”
“You wrote the protocol.” It was definitely a statement, which is probably how he found me now that I thought of it. If I hadn't been the liaison officer, then he would have just showed up to whoever that was.
“I wrote a lot of it.” I got two mugs down, the good ones, then put one back and took the chipped one instead, because some petty part of me didn't want to hand the big sexy alien who I'd already declined my nice mug.
“One month. We meet as officer and alien applicant. I run you through first-contact orientation, Earth customs, off-world logistics, the disclosure packet, all of it, by the book. You ask your questions. I answer them.”
“And then?”
“And then the month is up, you go back to your systems, I go back to my binders.” The kettle started its slow climb toward boiling. I kept my back to him. “And this becomes a strange thing that happened to me once. That I tell absolutely nobody.”
Behind me, nothing. No agreement, no argument, just that total attention prickling the back of my neck. I turned around, curious as to what he was thinking.
“Yes,” he said to all of it. Easy as breathing.
And I stood there holding two mugs and tried to take in what the next month would be like.
“Milk?” I said.
“I don't know. I've never had it.”
“We'll find out, then.” And I heard it a half-second too late. There was no we. It was just him and me. Separately.
He didn't catch it. He was busy trying to change colors, helplessly blue at the knuckles.
I busied myself with the kettle and teacups so I didn't have to watch him do it, and I thought: Okay. One month. You are a professional. You have handled harder things until you could ship them off. This will be the same. No falling for the hunky alien.
I didn't, at that point, know a single thing about how badly I was lying to myself. Give me credit. I'm consistent. I'd been doing it since 8:42 four days ago. But the water came to a boil, and I made tea for the hunkiest alien I'd ever seen. I made one teacup with milk and one without.
“It's hot,” I told him, handing over the chipped mug. “Don't inhale it. And for the record, the document you read? The intake philosophy?” I made myself meet his eyes, which were doing an alarming amount of things to my nervous system. “I meant every word of it.”
“I know,” he stated matter of factly as he sniffed at the mug of tea. “That is why I came.”
And that was the moment I should have been most afraid. There was no way he came all this way just to check out the process, or because he was curious about anything other than me.
I handed him the milk anyway and watched him taste it for the first time in his life.
He went ludicrously blue at the edges over two percent from the corner store, and I thought, very clearly, oh, no.
Not the panicked one. The other one… the one you feel deep in your gut.
The oh no that means you already know exactly how this ended and you were going to do it, anyway.
Perfect. Just wonderful. I drank my tea and didn't throw myself out the window, which I was counting as a professional success.