Page 3 of Delivered and Devoured
The door to her left opens.
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 wordssomething to doin 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.
