Page 13 of Delivered and Devoured
“I’m fine.”
“You haven’t blinked in forty seconds.”
“That’s a normal amount of not blinking.”
“It is not.”
His hand is still on the pouch. My hand goes to the pouch. Our fingers overlap on the foil and his are cool and dry and longer than mine by a full knuckle, and neither of us corrects this for one beat, two beats, a third beat that goes on long enough to qualify as its own small diplomatic incident, and then he lets go, and I pull the pouch tomy chest like I’ve claimed it in combat. I drink. Station filtration. Flat. The best thing I have ever tasted.
Don’t think about his hands. Don’t think about the hands. Hands are not the point. The point is the message. Send the message. Be a professional woman who is trapped in a cargo bay by her own hand. Her own literal hand. On a panel. That she touched. STOP THINKING ABOUT HANDS.
“Captain,” HORATIO says, from somewhere in the ceiling. The voice has changed since the klaxon. Quieter. Less like an AI narrating his own one-act play and more like an AI who has been told by someone bigger than him to use his indoor voice. “The bay temperature is stabilizing. Life support is nominal. I have adjusted the ambient lighting for extended habitation. Shall I adjust further?”
“Leave it.”
“Of course, Captain. I will note that the current lighting is — and I mean this with no editorial intent whatsoever — quite flattering.”
“HORATIO.”
“I am simply maintaining accuracy, Captain.”
The message to Flossie writes itself while I am trying not to look at the ceiling or at the lighting or at the shirtless male; the lighting is reportedly flattering. My fingers move on the input pad and I do not check what they’ve typed because if I check I will rewrite it and if I rewrite it, I will be here all day and I am already here all day. I press send.
“Done.”
“Good.” He tips his chin toward the cargo crates by the far wall. “Sit down.”
“I’m fine standing.”
“Your knees are shaking.”
My knees are, in fact, shaking. They have been shaking since the klaxon and the rest of me has been pretending not to notice, and now that he’s said it out loud the pretense collapses and my legs do something in the neighborhood of buckling. I cross the hold. I sit on the crate.
Jazil does not sit; instead, he is already moving back toward the comm console, pulling a headset off the wall hook, and his free hand changes the display from comm-out to something denser. Schematics. Station grid overlays. Security channel headers scrolling in orange text.
“HORATIO, patch me to docking authority. And get Morrison’s dispatch on the secondary.”
“Already waiting, Captain. The docking authority is on channel six. Morrison’s office is on nine. Shall I note your tone preference?”
“No.”
“Professional it is, then. Patching.”
He works through the lockdown as if it were a regular Tuesday incident.
I sit on the crate with my hands in my lap — both of them, flat, palms down, because I have been explicitly and catastrophically taught that my hands are not to be trusted near panels — and I watch him deal with it. Docking authority first: calm, brief, an exchange between someone who knows the protocols and someone on the other end who is very clearly having a worse day than Jazil is. He gives his OOPS ID, his bay number, the lockdown trigger code, and the containment status of the pod. His voice does not change register once. He could be ordering lunch.
Morrison’s dispatch is different. Warmer. Faster. He calls her Mother, not Morrison, and the voice that comes back through the comm is clipped and female and sounds like it has seventeen otherthings happening and has chosen to give him thirty seconds of its undivided attention, which is apparently more than most people get.
“Bay-restricted, not station-wide,” he says. “Twenty-four hours. Pod’s stable. HORATIO’s filed the report. I have the SNAG courier with me.”
A pause. Something comes back I can’t hear. He glances at me. The glance is quick and does something I am choosing not to examine.
“She’s fine,” he says. “I’ll make sure.”
He’ll make sure. He told Morrison he’ll make sure. About me. This is a professional statement made by a professional male on a professional channel to his professional superior, and my face is doing a thing about it I would like it to stop doing immediately.
He signs off and switches to the station’s security feed. Bay 13, split-screen with Bay 14. In Bay 13, Vresh is pacing. The image is low-resolution and blue-tinted, but the pacing has a quality to it that suggests the formal complaints are now being composed in real time, possibly in multiple languages. Jazil watches it for two seconds, makes a sound that is not quite a laugh, and closes the feed.
