Chapter 1 #2
Not a door, a doorway, because the alien who emerges through it is taller than the doorway should reasonably allow and the doorway has clearly given up trying.
Crimson skin. Black geometric markings and fuzzy arms. Curled black horns.
Gold eyes that flick across me in a single pass — log, assess, move on — and then his attention slides past me to Flossie, and the prehensile tail behind him performs a movement I do not believe he is conscious of.
It curls casually, and the tip rests for two seconds against Flossie’s wrist, where she’s writing. A tap. Gone.
Flossie does not look up. Her pen does not pause. The corner of her mouth moves a quarter of a millimeter.
Do not look at the tail. I did not see the tail. There is no tail in this room.
“Xor,” Flossie says. “I’m interviewing.”
“Apologies. I will not be a moment. The Hadley estimate.”
“On the desk. Top of the pile. Yes, that one.”
He picks up a flimsy micro-pad. He nods at me — small, courteous, the precise opposite of a stare — and leaves. The tail goes with him.
Flossie sets her pen down. She closes the notebook over her thumb, marking the page. She breathes in through her nose and lets it out, and when her eyes lift to mine, they are warm and faintly rueful.
“I’m going to apologize in advance,” she says. “We are a small operation in our fourth week of trading, and Xor and I have not yet worked out how to schedule one uninterrupted hour, and the universe is finding this funny. Bear with me. I am paying attention. I hope the tea is satisfactory?”
“It’s lovely tea.”
“It’s bergamot and a thing I’m not allowed to name in case the customs people read it. Where were we?”
“You were going to ask me about — sorry, you were about to —”
Flossie laces her fingers over the notebook. She looks at me for a beat longer than an interviewer should look at someone.
“I’m going to abandon my list of questions.”
Oh.
“Instead of the questions, I am going to give you something to do.”
The fairy lights, the tea, the very-warm jacket — all of them go a half-step further away. A room rearranging itself around the words something to do in a voice that means it.
“A working trial,” she says. “We will call it that. I have a minor task that needs doing today, and you are, as it happens, in the building. If you do this, and you do it cleanly, we will sit down again at the end of the day with a fresh pot and a fresh page, and I will offer you a contract. If you do not — well. We will have a different conversation. Either way, I will have learned what I came here to learn. Are you up for it?”
The mug shakes. I make it stop. The lucky top, under the jacket, has nothing to say about this. The lucky top, I notice, has gone very quiet.
“Yes.”
“Excellent, Lorri!”
She turns the notebook around so that the open page faces me. Beside it, she sets a slim datapad, screen lit, with a name and a face on it.
The face is a problem.
A problem in ways my interview brain is not equipped to handle on twelve minutes of sleep and a too-tight top. I look down at the datapad the way I look at a restaurant bill when I’ve ordered the wrong wine.
Skiveth. It says on the readout. Skiveth male.
Forty-one standard. Eyes like — that can’t be the actual color; that has to be the lighting.
Are those ridges? Those are ridges. Down both forearms. Visible in a credential photo.
They put the ridges in the credential photo.
Why are the ridges in the credentials photo —
“Jazil Ereux,” Flossie is saying. “Skiveth male. Long-haul OOPS courier, fourteen years on the route, twelve of them Morrison’s. He is — yes, all right, lovey, he is a bit, isn’t he? They photograph well, the Skiveth. Try not to dwell.”
“I’m not — I wasn’t —”
“You were. It’s fine. Everyone does. Morrison sent me his credentials so you’d recognize him at the ramp without having to flag anyone down. Making it easy for us.”
Not making this easy at all. Making this much harder. I would like to give the datapad back and I would like to put the datapad face down. I am going to put the datapad face down. No, that’s worse. That’s worse, Lorri.
“Got it. Yes. Got it.”
“He is also terrific at his job, which is the relevant detail.” Flossie taps the datapad with her pen.
“Morrison has flagged a salvaged stasis pod for SNAG processing. Origin unknown. Manifest blank. OOPS contained it, Morrison took one look and said it wasn’t theirs.
It’s ours. Ereux is bringing it in on his long-haul route.
He’s docking at Bay Fourteen in,” — a glance at her wrist — “thirty-five minutes. I need you to meet him at the ramp. Sign the chain-of-custody. Escort the pod back through the service corridor. Don’t let anyone else handle it.
Don’t open it, don’t peer at it, don’t be charming to it. Bring it home.”
“Bay Fourteen?”
“Bay Fourteen.”
“Sign the chain-of-custody.”
“Yes.”
“Bring it back.”
“Yes.”
She holds my gaze. Her eyes are warm. Her eyes are also doing a thing that is faintly a test.
“This one is a personal favor to me. Morrison and I have a thing. She sends me work; I don’t make her regret it. So.” A small, level smile. “Show me what you can do, lovey, and then come back and have a second cup of tea with me. All right?”
“Yes. Yes. Bay Fourteen, Ereux, chain-of-custody, don’t open it, bring it back. Got it.”
“Off you go. Service corridor’s faster. Mind the splash zone on Level Three.”
On my feet. The jacket does not creak. The lucky top, under the jacket, is suddenly aware of itself like a stone in a shoe — present, insistent, not going anywhere. I sit back down to put the mug on the desk because I have somehow forgotten I was holding it. I stand again.
The datapad is still on the notebook. The face is still on the datapad. I do not look at it. I am being adult about this. I am a professional. I have a task.
I look at it.
Oh, that’s not fair. That is not fair at all. What is going on at this station?
“Lorri.”
At the door. Flossie has not got up. She is, however, looking at me the way she looked at the dent. A little wry. A little fond. Like she has seen this particular thing before and has suspicions about how it ends.
“Breathe,” she says. “You’re allowed.”
The corridor swallows me. The fairy lights end at the door. Bergamot gives way to lubricant in three steps.
Bay Fourteen. Ereux. Chain-of-custody. Don’t open it. Don’t fuck this up, don’t fuck this up, don’t —
Under the jacket, the lucky top has finally found something to say.
It says: prove her right.
I keep walking. The face on the datapad, the one I did not dwell on, walks with me.
The service corridor on Level Three has a splash zone.
Someone has taped a handwritten sign to the wall that reads CAUTION: SPLASH ZONE and below it, in different handwriting: and also: don’t ask.
A maintenance pipe weeps steadily into a collection bucket.
My left boot goes through the reflection on the floor, and I do the hop-skip-pivot of someone who cannot afford wet socks today, and then I’m through, and the corridor spits me out onto the Docking Ring concourse.
The concourse does not ease you in.
It hits all at once — fryer oil spitting from a vendor stall three kiosks down, the bass thrum of a docking clamp releasing overhead, two separate conversations at volume in languages neither of which is mine.
A child is being told off in something liquid and fast, and the music of it is I told you not to touch that in any tongue.
A cargo trolley shunts past, and my elbow catches the edge of a signage board, and the signage board is fine, I am fine, nobody saw.
Two OOPS couriers come the other way, shoulder to shoulder, moving like people who know where they’re going. Fresh patches — chevrons I haven’t memorized yet. Mother’s people. The thought comes and goes.
Bay Fourteen. Ereux. Chain-of-custody. Don’t open it. Don’t peer at it. Don’t be charming about it. Bring it home.
The loop has been running since the service corridor and has developed footnotes.
The main footnote is a credentials photo I was told not to dwell on and have been dwelling on with the committed focus of a woman running on twelve minutes of sleep and one cup of tea.
Blue eyes. Slit pupils. Ridges down both forearms in an official photograph, which — that’s a deliberate sexy choice.
Not the point.
Frying batter fades to hydraulic fluid and back.
Bay numbers run along the wall to my left in yellow stencil and I’m tracking them in my peripheral vision while also managing the trolley traffic and also the loop and also trying to work out what my hair is doing at the back because it doesn’t feel like what I did to it this morning and there are too many things.
Too many inputs and my brain is attempting to log all of them and succeeding at approximately none of them.
A number on the floor, bold and yellow. I clock it. Keep walking. Up the ramp.
The hold is dim. Cold-dim, cargo-dim, a full tier below working light. My boots ring on the ship-grade plate, and I adjust my weight to quiet them down.
“Hello?” Voice going up at the end. Not ideal. “Ereux? Anyone?”
The darkness at the far end shifts.
Not a small shift. Something with mass behind it, something that moves air before sound.
Then a shape separates from the shadows, and it is not a person, or it is a person in the same way that a storm front is weather.
Technically accurate, not the important part — and it is very large and ancient, and its eyes in the dark are the specific yellow of something that has been deciding whether to be annoyed with me for several seconds and has now decided.
It roars.