CHAPTER 8
Ten Minutes Not Working
Ten minutes appeared on the duty board like a clerical error.
Rhyven stared at her own name beside the word RELIEF and assumed Deryn had made a mistake.
“No,” Deryn said before she could speak. “I know what I wrote.”
“Wave Four is still arriving.”
“Harven has the route table. Selka has passenger reconciliation. I have dispatch. Olyss has Corra covering clinic intake. You are not primary on anything for ten minutes.”
“That sounds unsafe.”
“It sounds like staffing.”
The rumor from the western segment had not disappeared.
Local leads were repeating the correction: no one had been left behind, the passenger discrepancy had been reconciled, Alwen Tare was traveling safely with a neighbor.
Still, questions kept arriving from vehicles farther west, each slightly altered by distance.
Rhyven looked at the board again.
“Eight minutes.”
“Ten.”
“Nine.”
Deryn pointed toward the parked school shuttle beside the freight wall. “Go negotiate with someone who cares.”
Olyss was already walking that direction carrying two cups.
Rhyven narrowed her eyes. “This was coordinated.”
“Yes,” Deryn said. “Unlike some things around here.”
“I can reassign you.”
“Relief started thirty seconds ago. You currently lack the authority.”
Rhyven considered several professionally inappropriate responses and chose none of them.
She followed Olyss.
The shuttle had delivered school supplies rather than passengers and now sat empty with its side door open to the wet afternoon. Olyss climbed into the back row and handed Rhyven a cup.
“Broth?”
“Tea.”
Rhyven took a cautious sip.
“Actual tea.”
“Your standards have collapsed.”
“My standards are adapting to field conditions.”
Olyss smiled and shifted so Rhyven could sit beside her without their knees touching unless either woman chose it.
The door remained open.
Rain misted the yard beyond them. People crossed between shelter awnings carrying blankets, route cards, food trays. From inside the shuttle, the scene looked framed and distant, close enough to hear but far enough that no one seemed to require an immediate answer.
Rhyven’s body did not believe this state.
She kept listening for her name.
“You are working,” Olyss said.
“I am sitting.”
“Your face is working.”
“My face has duties.”
“Apparently it is supervising three radios from here.”
Rhyven looked at the small receiver clipped to her vest.
“It is off.”
“I know.”
“I dislike that you noticed.”
“I am a physician. I notice symptoms.”
“This is not a symptom.”
“You are attempting to hear a radio you deliberately turned off.”
Rhyven drank tea instead of answering.
For almost a minute, neither spoke.
It was longer than most of the silences they had shared since Kethavere. Those had been functional pauses, places to breathe between instructions. This one had no assigned purpose.
Rhyven found it more frightening than a moving road.
Olyss looked out the open door. “There.”
“What?”
“Nothing happened for sixty seconds.”
“Reckless.”
“We survived.”
Rhyven smiled despite herself.
The smile faded because she knew what the ten minutes were for.
Not rest alone.
A conversation had been following them since Mile Zero.
Olyss turned the cup between her hands. “Do you want to use the remaining eight minutes to keep avoiding it?”
“Seven and a half.”
“Rhyven.”
She looked at Olyss.
No uniform could make the woman look less like herself.
Damp hair had dried unevenly near her temples.
Fatigue softened the strict line she wore around difficult decisions.
There was a faint broth stain on one sleeve.
Rhyven wanted to touch it with her thumb and hated that such a minor desire could feel more revealing than wanting to kiss her had.
“The kisses mattered,” Rhyven said.
“We established that.”
“I know.”
“Good start.”
Rhyven exhaled.
“I am attracted to you.”
Olyss’s eyebrows rose.
“You asked for no euphemism.”
“I did. Continue.”
“I like being around you when you are not correcting me.”
“Generous.”
“I like being around you when you are correcting me too, which is worse.”
Olyss laughed quietly.
Rhyven continued before courage reorganized itself into logistics.
“I think about kissing you when we are not kissing. I notice when you walk into a space. I notice when you leave it. I know the sound of your voice on three different radio channels, which is not information I intended to acquire.”
Olyss’s face had gone very still.
“And?” she asked.
“And I do not know whether any of that survives an ordinary week.”
The fear sounded smaller spoken aloud.
Not less real.
Olyss rested her cup on the seat beside her.
“What does an ordinary week look like to you?”
Rhyven looked at the floor.
“Work that starts and ends approximately when scheduled. Buying food before there is nothing left in the cupboard. Laundry. A route meeting that does not involve ground movement. Maybe seeing someone twice because both of you planned it rather than because the same emergency keeps placing you in the same kilometer.”
“Terrifying.”
“You are mocking me.”
“Only a little.”
Olyss’s voice softened.
“My ordinary week has clinic rounds, home visits, forms I resent, meals I forget until Corra threatens me, and at least one person insisting a symptom started ’recently’ when they mean five years ago.”
Rhyven smiled.
“That sounds believable.”
“I also have laundry.”
“Compelling compatibility.”
“Exactly.”
Olyss shifted one knee until it touched Rhyven’s.
The contact was deliberate.
Rhyven did not move away.
“You are afraid the chemistry belongs to the crisis,” Olyss said.
“Yes.”
“I cannot prove it doesn’t.”
Rhyven looked at her.
“That is an aggressively unromantic answer.”
“You like honest uncertainty. I have witnesses.”
Rhyven groaned.
Olyss smiled. “I cannot prove it survives ordinary time because we have not had ordinary time. Neither have you. What I can tell you is that I wanted to kiss you after the street stopped moving. I wanted to kiss you while we were drinking terrible coffee. I wanted to kiss you under the freight awning while Deryn was close enough to ruin both our lives with commentary.”
“She would.”
“Immediately.”
“Cruelly.”
“With documentation.”
Rhyven laughed.
Olyss’s knee remained against hers.
“I like you when you are not solving anything,” Olyss said. “I liked you five minutes ago when you were staring at a cup as if tea required a contingency plan. That seems relevant.”
Rhyven’s throat tightened.
“It is.”
“Then do not decide in advance that ordinary life will prove us false.”
The phrasing landed precisely where Rhyven’s worst habits lived.
Do not decide in advance.
She had spent years trying to protect people from uncertainty by getting there first, naming the route, controlling the sequence, reducing the places where chance could enter. Olyss had challenged that instinct in public work from the beginning.
Now she was challenging it here.
“You think I am planning the breakup before we have planned a date,” Rhyven said.
“I think you are designing an emotionally efficient exit.”
“That sounds worse.”
“It should.”
Rhyven looked out the shuttle door.
A boy in a yellow raincoat was placing stones along the edge of a puddle.
Each time water pushed one aside, he moved it back.
A woman nearby watched without correcting him.
The task had no chance of success and no need to succeed.
He was simply doing it because he wanted to see where the water would go.
Rhyven felt uncomfortably educated by a child.
“I do not want to exit,” she said.
Olyss did not answer immediately.
Rhyven turned back.
“That is also not a definition,” she added.
“No.”
“But it is true.”
“Good.”
Olyss’s hand rested on the seat between them, palm down.
Rhyven placed her own beside it, not touching.
“Same pace?” she asked.
Olyss looked at the small gap between their hands.
“Yes. But I reserve the right to ask you to stop turning future fear into present policy.”
“Specific standards.”
“Very.”
Rhyven moved her little finger until it touched Olyss’s.
Nothing dramatic happened.
No ground shifted.
No one shouted their names.
The contact was so ordinary it nearly undid her.
Olyss’s finger curled lightly around hers.
“How much time?” Rhyven asked.
Olyss checked her watch.
“Three minutes.”
“We are wasting relief efficiently.”
“I am proud of us.”
They sat that way for another minute.
Then Olyss said, “There is another thing.”
Rhyven braced. “Of course there is.”
“When we do define this, I don’t want the definition to become another route sheet.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning if we decide to date, I do not want a contract for how often we speak, what each message means, or which one of us is responsible for maintaining the emotional infrastructure.”
Rhyven looked offended. “I would never call it emotional infrastructure.”
“You would think it.”
“Possibly.”
“I want room for something to be ordinary and imperfect.”
Rhyven nodded slowly.
“I want clarity.”
“Those are not opposites.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“I am learning.”
Olyss smiled. “Good answer.”
A shadow crossed the open shuttle door.
Deryn stood outside.
She looked at their linked little fingers.
Then at Rhyven.
Then at Olyss.
Her face became a work of disciplined neutrality.
“Your ten minutes are over,” she said.
Rhyven removed her hand with dignity.
“Did you arrive exactly now?”
“I have no idea what you mean.”
“Deryn.”
“Operational update.”
“You are enjoying this.”
“I am a professional.”
Olyss climbed down from the shuttle first. “That was almost convincing.”
Deryn handed Rhyven a radio.
The world returned all at once.
Front Wave Three was slowing. Two private cars had stopped inside their assigned gap.
A driver farther west was asking to turn around toward Sereth because his sister was in Wave Four and he had heard “they were still finding people.” Another vehicle had pulled onto the shoulder to call family members, forcing three cars behind it to brake and compress spacing.
The rumor was no longer only a question.
It was becoming behavior.