1 Kaia #3
Warm. He was warm the way the sun was warm, and the green broke over me, green, green, a whole hillside of it.
The heat that had settled in my belly flared into a heavy, pooling ache, and the second heartbeat under my ribs surged up out of the dark where I had kept it my entire life and slammed against the inside of my chest with one word.
Mine.
Not my word. Not my voice. Older than my voice, under it, certain as bedrock—
I snatched my hand back.
The cuff clattered to the desk, unfastened, and his wrist lay there still bare, still patient, and my fingers had already found the edge of my own cuff on my left wrist, thumb circling the band, around and around, the worry-stone motion I only ever made alone in the dark when no one could see the Steward needing soothing.
Tommy had gone completely still.
The chatter was gone. The tourist was gone.
What sat across my desk now was watching me with a focus so total and so quiet that the hair lifted on my arms, and his nostrils flared once, slow, deliberate, like a man trying desperately to place a scent he knew he should recognize, his jaw tightening when his nose failed to find it.
For half a second something moved behind his eyes that I didn’t dare try to understand.
I forced my hands back down, holding the flat of the tablet like a shield.
Across the room, Sloane was already moving. Before Miller could even register the sudden drop in my posture, Sloane stepped directly into his line of sight, blocking him with her athletic frame as she dryly asked him to review a security log on her tablet.
Marisol stepped in from station three, her face calm and solid. “Yes, Steward,” she said, her voice a soothing wall between me and the room.
I picked up the fallen cuff and lined it up over his wrist again, careful to only touch the unbleached cotton of his sleeve. I pressed the seam.
The hex-thread bit down.
His whole arm went rigid. Not a flinch—a flinch is a small thing, a hand near a flame. This was the full-body lock of a man who had just felt something reach inside him and close a fist. His breath stopped. The tendons in his forearm stood up like cable.
And the noise under my ribs—the second heartbeat that had been thrashing all morning—went quiet.
As though the cage and the thing in the cage had both turned, together, toward the same point in the room, and found it, and recognized it.
“Intake is complete,” I said, and I was already standing, tablet pressed flat against my ribs hard enough to feel its edge through my uniform. “Escort our guest to Dormitory B. He is to receive the standard fasting meal and the evening tonic. Sundown orientation is mandatory.”
“Yes, Steward.”
“It was really something meeting you,” Tommy said, rising, rubbing at the cuff like a watch he hadn’t decided whether to keep.
Marisol took his elbow and steered him toward the dormitory corridor, and he went easily, talking already, asking her whether the fasting meal came with a meat option and whether anyone would object if he narrated his own funeral when it didn’t.
At the mouth of the corridor, he looked back.
His eyes found me across the full length of the sorting bay like there was no one else standing in it, and held, and then Marisol drew him around the corner and he was gone.
The lightheadedness arrived first. Then the ache—behind my breastbone, deep, a hollow gnawing pull, as though something in my chest had been tied to something in his and the line was paying out, and out, and beginning to drag.
I gripped the edge of my desk. The wood was solid. The wood was real. A true servant feels the pressure and calls it—
The catechism cut out halfway through, and for one terrible breath there was nothing in my head at all except—
Fever. I cataloged it with both hands flat on the desk.
Elevated pulse, nausea, olfactory disturbance, vasovagal response.
A virus, picked up from all the unwashed intakes.
Or the suppressant dose drifting low—all the weeks without rest would burn through anyone’s calibration.
I would file for an adjustment tonight. I would request the IV panel moved up.
The medicine would be corrected, because everything that was wrong with me had always, always been correctable.
New intakes still waited in the receiving corridor. The Inner Circle walked this floor at dawn.
I straightened my spine, lifted my tablet, and turned back toward the line—
—and discovered my feet had already turned the other way, toward Dormitory B, and carried me three full steps before I caught them.
I pulled myself back, breathing the residual lavender oil down the corridor after him in the air, my shoes hitting the solid stone floor.
Sloane was standing at the threshold of the corridor, her arms crossed over her uniform. She didn’t ask what I was doing. She simply offered a small, clean cup of hot water she’d taken from the staff kettle.
“The next van is ten minutes out,” Sloane said, her voice dry, even. “Drink. You’re not doing this alone, Kaia.”
I took the cup, the warmth of the ceramic soaking into my palms. “Thank you.”
She nodded once, her pale eyes tracking Miller as he slunk toward the back exit, and went back to the floor. I took a single sip, squared my shoulders, and called the next number.