Chapter 9

"Run it from the beginning again," Lucie told the screen. She put her feet up on the bed, and picked up her bowl and spoon.

"Repeating," the androgynous computer voice confirmed.

The video flickered, then the big transit hall reappeared, with its multiple billboards flashing advertisements in between departure and arrive announcements. The security feed had been taken from high up above the travelers passing across the hall, or paused to study schedules or look for directions.

At the edge of the hall was a short arc of amenities, including a self-serve café with small tables jutting out into the hall.

Because this was a replay of the video, the computer followed the same instructions as before. It zoomed in on the table where Blake sat, a steaming beverage in front of her, and a pad in one hand, and her pack on the ground between her feet, where a snatcher would have difficulty grabbing it. She looked every centimeter the composed, experienced traveler that she was.

But the camera caught her quick glances up and around, as she scanned the hall. Lucie had decided that Blake was watching for both friends and foes.

Elijah settled on the chair at the next table, so that his shoulder was level with hers, but he was facing the other way. They didn't look at each other.

"You're late," Blake murmured, as the computer dialed up the volume.

"Blame Charlton City Security," Elijah replied, also in an undertone. "They're too good at their job. I had to shake them loose first."

"Blame yourself. You trained them," Blake said. Then, "We must stop meeting like this, Lije."

"Agreed." His tone was strained.

Blake grew still. She stopped scanning the hall. Her head shifted, an aborted sideways movement, as if she had been about to look at him. Then she brought her gaze back to the pad. "You really mean that?"

Lucie wondered if anyone who had ever watched this video had caught the pain in her voice.

"I do," Elijah said. "Here, take this. Swing your right hand back."

Blake's chest rose as she filled her lungs with air.

Relief. She sat back, as if she was relaxing, and let her hand swing down beside the chair.

Their hands touched. Brushed. Fingers tangled for a few electric heartbeats.

Then Blake brought her hand up to the table and rested it in front of the pad she was apparently reading. Then she shifted it out of the way. Looked down.

"My, my. The Royal Esplanade, Lije? You're spoiling me."

"A room is booked for the first of next month," Elijah said. "They're expecting us to arrive separately. We're the Sangs."

"The Sangs?" She pressed her lips together.

"You don't like the name?"

"It's…common."

"That's the point."

"It doesn't have any pizazz."

"Would you rather be the Smiths?"

Blake grimaced. "That has even less virtue. Sang will do."

Voices raised and cries of alarm pulled the focus of the security camera back to the hall in general, then zoomed in on black uniformed security people striding into the hall.

Charlton City Security.

"Time to go," Blake said, picking up her pack.

"See you on the first, Mizz Sang."

Blake paused, staring at her backpack to avoid the gazes of the approaching guards. The corner of her mouth turned up. Then she rose, swung the pack over her shoulder, and slipped swiftly across the hall to the nearest departure gantry.

Lucie didn't bother panning the camera back to the tables. From the first time she had watched the video, she knew that Elijah had already gone.

"Again," she said.

"Don't you think you've watched it enough, Lucie?" Barney's voice issued from the overhead speaker, not the screen itself.

Lucie put her bowl of soup on the floor with a soft thunk. "You're spying on me?"

"You've watched that video thirteen times."

"About a dozen! Say ‘a dozen times.' Not thirteen, like you're a computer!"

Silence.

Lucie picked up her bowl. "I'm sorry, that was mean."

"It was the truth." Barney's voice was soft. Then, "You've watched it over a dozen times. What are you looking for, Luce?"

"Nothing! I just like watching it!"

Again, Barney's silence, which always felt…heavy.

"I don't know why," Lucie admitted. "I just do, okay?"

"You didn't go in to work today."

Lucie's conscience twitched. No, she had not gone into work this morning. And she still wasn't sure why.

The morning after Sona Shearer had stomped all over the Sky Dome, Lucie had reported for the breakfast shift as usual, even though she had helped Olivette shut down the restaurant very late the night before.

Lucie had been less than an hour into her shift and had been delivering another of Olivette's popular breakfast platters when she saw Elijah Santiago settling at the table two up from where she was standing. It was a table for two against the mid-wall.

And it was in her section.

Lucie hurried to the table. "I can clear your usual table for you, if you prefer."

"Whole section's full back there," Elijah said, and held the menu out to her. "My usual, please."

Lucie pressed her lips together. "You'll have to tell me what that is." She had never served him before.

He told her and she punched it in quickly. "Ten minutes," she assured him.

When she delivered the platter eight minutes and thirty-seven seconds later, he just nodded his thanks.

She turned away silently. She'd heard enough from Edme to know Elijah hated chit chat.

"Did you sleep well, yesterday?"

Lucie spun back to face him. "I… Ah…"

"Afterwards. Did you sleep well?" His gaze was steady upon her face, as if he really was interested in the answer.

"Yes," Lucie admitted. "I felt like a new person all over again, when I woke up. I didn't have any trouble working out the late shift, and I thought I would." She swallowed. "Your prescription worked."

He nodded and she thought he looked pleased, but she wasn't sure.

"I'll have a carafe of the house blend, too," he said.

"Oh, yes, of course. Coming." She hurried away.

He didn't say anything else to her that morning, but the next morning when he strolled through the glass doors, he went straight over to the same table.

Edme peered through the serving slot and wrinkled her nose. "You're welcome to him, honey. If sociopathy was still a thing, he'd be a good example of it."

"He's not that bad," Lucie said defensively and went to check that he did, indeed, want his usual order.

She didn't have a chance to ask. Elijah held the menu out to her, and said, "You look tired."

Lucie took the menu. "I…uh…stayed up last night watching the game."

"Tankball?" He lifted a brow. "I didn't know you liked it."

"Barney is teaching me the rules. It's…" Lucie could feel her cheeks heating. "It's fun."

"I've always found it to be a confusing mess," Elijah said, and looked down at the big pad he'd placed on the table.

Lucie would have moved off without a word, but if she did, then she would be letting him think she was the type of person who liked to watch a "confusing mess".

She said, "Tankball is a strategic game. It's three dimensional, and you have to think five moves ahead of where the ball is. It only looks confusing if you don't understand that."

Elijah looked up from the pad, his eyes narrowed. "Is that so?"

Lucie drew in a deep breath. "Yes, it is so." And this time, she did walk away, her heart in her mouth and her pulse banging in her ears.

Elijah Santiago had continued to sit at the same table every morning since, and every morning, their conversations grew longer. They discussed tankball—well, Lucie did, while Elijah stopped dismissing it as a silly game. They talked about the music festival scheduled for the main plaza in the next week, and the more famous musicians and bands who would be playing.

They talked about the new rain schedule, which everyone was complaining about. Elijah mentioned that he would be flying out and wouldn't be there the next morning, so then they talked about Shanterry, where he was going, and the amazing technology that was coming out of that sector including, of course, the original and best miniature spine implants that let sentient computers live and breathe inside cloned human bodies, like hers.

It wasn't until she caught herself laughing at Elijah's description of the first time his second mate had found his way to Interspace, the other dimension that only Varkans could navigate, that allowed ships to cross vast distances of space in an eyeblink, and had wet his pants in astonishment, that Lucie thought to ask herself a vital question.

Is Elijah sitting at the table because of me?

The answer was binary. Yes or no. But the implications of either answer terrified her so much that this morning, Lucie had felt sick at the idea of facing him, and wondering what his answer would be.

It wasn't real nausea, but she had felt uneasy enough that telling Olivette she couldn't possibly manage the shift had not felt like the lie it really was.

And now Barney was challenging her about it, too.

"It was my day off," Lucie said defensively.

"Not on the Sky Dome's schedule."

Lucie gave a soft hissing sound, a small hard knot in the center of her chest starting to hurt. "Barney…" she warned him.

"You tell me not to break privacy, but you've watch that video so many times…it's not for information about the man you have to avoid, anymore."

Lucie put her bowl down once more. Carefully. She put her feet back on the ground and gripped her hands together. "Look at me," she said.

Barney appeared on the screen hanging over the bed. He wasn't smiling.

"You have to understand something about me, Barney. I don't know if it's because I'm a new Varkan or if it's just the way I am. But I make bad decisions."

"Everyone does. Humans most of all."

She shook her head. "I make too many decisions based on feelings and…and not enough datacore processing. I know you don't know what that means. Not yet. But they warn you about it in the nursery. That emotions are so strong and so…physical, that at first, you don't realize how much they're driving your decisions. They control you, in the beginning. You have to learn how to separate decisions from emotions. And I'm still not good at it."

"What decision are you trying to make?"

Lucie stirred her cooling soup.

"Luce?"

"I don't know if I'm going to go on to Nicia," Lucie said. "Not yet, anyway."

Silence.

She looked up.

Barney was frowning. "What's difficult about that?" he asked.

Lucie rolled her eyes. "I want to stay, Barney! And there's zero reason to stay except for a tiny bit…damn it, I worked it out. There's a point seven five percent chance that he'd even consider the idea. But my emotions, Barny! They're clinging to that tiny bit of hope and arguing I should just stay. When every line of reasoning I can follow says I'm an idiot if I don't get on that flight to Nicia."

Barney was still frowning. "And watching that video, over and over, helps you figure that out?"

Lucie stirred her soup once more. "He didn't let her down."

●

Elijah settled in his muscle chair, juggling the piping hot plate of tamales, his mouth watering. "Computer, show tonight's tank game."

The screen built in front of him, pulling ozone from the air and ionizing it to carry a charge.

"No, bigger," Elijah demanded, as the images of a tankball game in progress started to run.

The screen expanded.

Elijah bit into the first tamale. As spices and delicious heat registered on his tongue, he watched the long, tall defenseman—woman, in this case—screaming at the referee. Her face under the helmet was as wild-looking as it had been in the Sky Dome the morning she had flung food everywhere.

"What the…" Elijah muttered, as the tamale dripped cheese onto the plate. "Go back five minutes. Show me what happened."

The stream backed up and began again. Elijah forgot to eat, as he watched Sona Shearer "accidentally" ram into another player, her headlong thrust through zero gee converting into a full stop, while the other player was flung at high velocity up against the one solid wall of the tank, under the goal mouth.

The player grew still, limbs hanging askew, as he drifted back across the tank.

While the referee tried to expel her from the game, Sona Shearer screamed back at him, her hands on her hips, until two more refs pushed themselves through the zee zone to grab her elbows and haul her to the exit hatch.

The streamer at the bottom of the tank declared AFTER THREE OFFICIAL WARNINGS, SHEARER FIRST EVER EXPULSION IN LEAGUE HISTORY.

"No kidding…" Elijah murmured. "Computer, dismiss the screen."

The game went away.

Elijah ate his tamales, trying to ignore the silence. And trying to not think.

Finally, he put the tamales aside. "So why wasn't Lucie there this morning?" he asked the air.