Page 5 of Delivered and Devoured
The loop has been running since the service corridor and has developed footnotes. The main footnote is a credentials photo I was told not to dwell on and have been dwelling on with the committed focus of a woman running on twelve minutes of sleep and one cup of tea. Blue eyes. Slit pupils. Ridges down both forearms in an official photograph, which — that’s a deliberate sexy choice.
Not the point.
Frying batter fades to hydraulic fluid and back. Bay numbers run along the wall to my left in yellow stencil and I’m tracking them in my peripheral vision while also managing the trolley traffic and also the loop and also trying to work out what my hair is doing at the back because it doesn’t feel like what I did to it this morning and there aretoo many things. Too many inputs and my brain is attempting to log all of them and succeeding at approximately none of them.
A number on the floor, bold and yellow. I clock it. Keep walking. Up the ramp.
The hold is dim. Cold-dim, cargo-dim, a full tier below working light. My boots ring on the ship-grade plate, and I adjust my weight to quiet them down.
“Hello?” Voice going up at the end. Not ideal. “Ereux? Anyone?”
The darkness at the far end shifts.
Not a small shift. Something with mass behind it, something that moves air before sound. Then a shape separates from the shadows, and it is not a person, or it is a person in the same way that a storm front is weather. Technically accurate, not the important part — and it is very large and ancient, and its eyes in the dark are the specific yellow of something that has been deciding whether to be annoyed with me for several seconds and has now decided.
It roars.
The sound goes through me before my ears process it. My body makes every decision. Backwards, three steps, heel catching the ramp lip — down the ramp, jacket swinging open, datapad swinging with me, both arms doing the thing arms do when the brain has been bypassed by something older and louder than sense.
The concourse catches me at the bottom.Sorry-sorry-sorryto a pair of kneecaps that are already elsewhere. My heart is doing something load-bearing with my ribcage. One hand on the concourse wall and Istare at the floor because the floor is safe, and the floor is not currently roaring at me.
Nothing followed. The ramp is empty and still.
The number on the floor says 13, with the 1 nearly gone — worn to a suggestion, a ghost of paint at the left-hand edge of the stencil. The 3 is bold. Clear. Entirely legible. I read the whole thing as 14 because I was tracking seventeen other things and my brain made an executive decision with insufficient data and that decision was incorrect, and I walked up a dark ramp and shouted into the face of what appeared to be a very old, very large alien cargo hauler who has feelings about strangers near his bay and expressed them at volume directly into my face.
The digital signage above the ramp reads BAY 13.
Two ramps down: BAY 14.
I stand with my hand on the concourse wall for three full seconds. A passing dockworker glances at me. I give him the nod of a person who definitely meant to do that and he moves on.
Right.
Thirty paces.
The jacket is straightened. The lucky top is askew underneath it, and I can’t fix that without opening the jacket fully on the concourse, so I leave it. My hair is committed to something. I can’t tell what. My cheeks are past the point where I can call them flushed with a straight face; they are warm, continuously, a system running too hot that hasn’t found its reset. The pulse in my throat is visible. I can feel it tapping against my collar, and if I can feel it, then anyone standingclose enough can see it, which means I need to not let anyone stand close enough.
The digital signage above the ramp reads BAY 14. Both numerals are bold. Both numerals accounted for.
Floor marking. 14. Yes.
Up the ramp.
Warmth. Ship-warm — the deep, bone-in warmth of a vessel that has been running for hours and is still shedding it, heat that settles in the upper third of a space and makes the air feel inhabited. OOPS markings on the walls in orange-on-gray: route codes, contractor insignia, safety regs in three languages. Cargo ramp down. And in the center of it all, on a containment cradle that sits level and deliberate, the pod. Matte gray. Small. Diagnostic lights pulsing across the cradle strip: green, green, green. Stable. Contained.
Not roaring.
Two steps deeper and my eyes are still adjusting from the concourse light when I find him.
He’s at the far end of the hold near the inner hatch of his ship, most of his back to me, doing something to a wall panel with a tool I don’t have a name for. The OOPS overalls are present but only just — pooled at his hips, waistband low, the top half shucked down and the straps hanging loose at his sides. Above that is a considerable quantity of green skin, emerald-deep and vivid, catching the hold’s amber work-light in a way that makes the color seem as if it has its own source. Short dark hair, loose, slightly wavy on top — hair on his head that has clearly started the day as something and has since become something else entirely, and the something else is very —
The ridges on his forearms are visible as he works. The credentials photo had them too, but the photo did not have the light at this angleor the movement of actual living muscle underneath, and my brain, which has been valiantly processing inputs all morning, quietly closes several tabs and opens only this one.
There is a bead of sweat in the groove of his spine.
The specific, detached precision with which I notice this is the precision of a brain that has abandoned its remaining operating functions.
This is fine. The loop is still running, but it’s very far away, like something playing in another room. He is a professional contact. You are a professional. You are going to walk over there and present the datapad and say your name and be completely normal about —
