1 Kaia #2
“Mr.—” I checked the file I had memorized.
“Tommy.”
“The intake interview has a structure. The structure exists for your protection.”
“See, people keep saying things like that to me today.” He folded his arms on the edge of my desk, and the green smell thickened, and I stopped breathing through my nose.
“’For your protection.’ ‘For your comfort.’ The van had no windows, by the way.
For my comfort. I narrated the whole drive to the guy next to me like a nature documentary.
He cried, but I think it was unrelated.”
I caught Sloane’s eye across the room. She was leaning against the security rail, her short hair caught in the glare of the monitors as she checked her scanner, but she gave me a tiny, imperceptible tilt of her head—a signal that she had the security feed covered if this talkative dormant spun out of control.
“When did the disturbances begin?” I kept my eyes on the screen. “Your file indicates auditory and olfactory episodes, sleep disruption, unexplained instinctive behavior.”
“Unexplained instinctive behavior.” He tasted the phrase.
“That’s a really clinical way to describe it.
Wild stuff. Anyway, what’s your deal? You run this whole floor?
Because everyone else here looks at you like you’re the substitute teacher who turned out to be scarier than the real one, and I respect that. ”
He was deflecting. They all deflected—fear came out of frightened people in whatever shape it could find, and his shape was apparently a faulty faucet of words.
The intake Seeker had flagged it twice. Talkative.
Hiding behind jokes. It should have been simple.
It should have been the easiest read of the morning.
So why did his eyes keep doing that thing—that fractional flick to the bay doors, the brazier line, Miller’s position by the east wall—between jokes? Counting exits. Forty-one had counted exits too. Terrified people did that sometimes.
Terrified people did not sit like that, though. Loose through the shoulders. Weight balanced.
I didn’t answer his question or look up from the screen. “Next question. Have you experienced episodes of involuntary physical change? Altered vision, altered hearing, altered strength?”
“Have you?”
My pulse spiked—a dry, hot thump against the stilling frequencies embedded in the floor—but I did not look up from my screen.
“The questionnaire concerns you, Thomas. Not me.”
“Tommy.” He hadn’t moved, but his voice dropped half a register, the easy tourist charm peeling back to reveal something entirely too quiet. “And see, that’s interesting. Because you flinched. You don’t strike me as a flincher, Steward. You strike me as a woman who irons her socks.”
“I am logging a negative response,” I said, my voice flat, though the smell of him—sun on stone, crushed green, a well-tended fire—was coating the back of my tongue so thickly I could taste it.
“Next question. Have you experienced compulsions you could not explain? Urges toward aggression, toward flight, or toward the seeking of a specific person or place?”
He leaned in. Not far—just enough that the acoustic paneling and the braziers seemed to recede, leaving only the dark of his eyes.
“What if the noise is just loud, Steward? What if it feels like somebody’s been sitting on the lid of a pot your whole life, and the water finally figured out it was boiling? ”
My breath caught. A small, involuntary hitch in my chest. He heard it.
I watched the joke drain completely out of his face, leaving the features underneath hard, patient, and intensely awake.
He knew. Whatever this wrongness in the air was, he felt it too, and he was naming it aloud on a surveilled floor.
“Then we are here to turn off the stove,” I said, forcing my eyes to meet his. “It is the whole of our work. You came here for quiet. We provide quiet.”
The second heartbeat under my ribs turned over.
It had been still all morning, pressed flat and obedient. Now it moved like something rolling over in shallow water, and the motion dragged all the way up through my chest.
I locked my spine straight off the chair back. Chin level. Hands folded flat on the desk, right over left, pressure even.
The position lit up the old soreness between my shoulder blades—the muscles there had been trained into this shape by my mother’s nails, crescent moons pressed in until tendons learned to hold without trembling.
Holiness begins in the spine, not in the heart.
The ache was familiar. The ache was almost a comfort.
Tommy looked at my folded hands. Then at my face. The brightness in his expression banked down to something quieter and far more attentive, and that was worse, that was so much worse than the jokes.
“You know what’s funny?” His voice came down to match mine, register for register. “You’re the one in charge here. And you’re sitting like you’re bracing for a car crash, sweetheart.”
Sweetheart.
The word went through me and kept going, all the way down, and somewhere along the way my pulse picked it up and ran. Heat climbed the back of my neck. I lifted two fingers from my folded hands—a small motion, a Steward checking the time, nothing more—and pressed them under my jaw.
One-ten. One-fifteen. The beats crowded each other, sloppy, urgent, the count of a woman sprinting up a stairwell, and I was sitting perfectly still in a temperature-controlled intake bay.
The numbers had never lied to me before. The numbers were the one true text. Sixty-four meant the medicine held and the discipline held and I was safe to be near other people.
I took my fingers from my pulse and did not log the count.
This is a test. I reached for the doctrine and the doctrine came, smooth as a memorized psalm. The Order sends no trial without purpose. Too little sleep, overworked—of course the body misfires. Of course the flesh complains. A true servant feels the pressure and calls it grace.
There. Named, shelved, contained. I had not had a day off in weeks.
I had not had a date in four years, no dinners, no idle hours, nothing soft, because soft hours were when the static got loud.
I was sex-starved, plain and simple. A starved body grabbed at whatever passed close, projecting a ridiculous romantic fantasy onto a stranger just because he had broad shoulders and a pulse.
That was all this was. Simple, pathetic biology, misfiring at an unremarkable man with an overactive mouth.
I pulled the cuff tray toward me. The foam slid against the desk with a small dry hiss.
“We’re at the final stage of intake. The welcome cuff serves as your biometric tether for the duration of your stay.
It will quiet the disturbances you’ve been experiencing.
Most guests describe the sensation as relief. ”
“Most guests.” He eyed the tray of nested cuffs, hex-fiber and pale stone, calibrated twice because I had made an acolyte cry over a timestamp. “What do the other guests describe it as?”
“Roll up your sleeve, please. Left arm.”
He was wearing flannel over a thermal, sleeves down to the wrist, the only intake of the morning who hadn’t arrived already stripped to the Cleansing Garment—late addition, processed straight off the last van. He looked at his own arm like it had been accused of something.
“Right now?”
“The cuff seats against bare skin. Stone over the pulse.” My voice stayed perfectly level. My heart was throwing itself against my chest like a fist on a door. “Sleeve. Please.”
He undid the button at his cuff. Slowly.
Worked the flannel back, then the thermal under it, fold by fold over his muscular forearm, and I watched the fabric retreat up the brown line of an old scar and I was aware of every centimeter the way you’re aware of a burning fuse.
The bay went on around us—vials clicking into racks, Marisol’s low voice at station three, Miller’s boots—and all of it arrived from very far away, underwater, behind glass.
He raised his forearm near his face, rubbing his nose against his sleeve, sniffing twice in a quick, frustrated rhythm.
“Seriously, what is that? It’s like my nose is unplugged, but I can’t quite...
” He shook his head, the words trailing off.
He paused, crook of his sleeve caught in his hand, and tilted his head toward the ceiling corner.
“For the record? That left camera’s got a blind spot. You should really tell somebody.”
“Your wrist.” My voice did not change. My pulse, beneath my jaw, did.
He smiled, a slow, dark-rimmed grin catching the light. “Right. The wrist. Slowest kid in class. Story of my life.”
He laid his bare wrist on the desk between us. Palm up. His pulse beat there, visible, unhurried.
I lifted the cuff from the foam. Two fingers of slack. Stone centered. The whole of our work. I had done this dozens of times this morning and several thousand times in my life as a Steward and my hands knew the motion like it was a prayer.
I reached across the desk and slid the band beneath his wrist, and my fingers brushed the bare skin over his pulse.
The breath went out of me.