Page 2 of Ward

“Noted,” Aldric said, “and declined,” and ended the call.

The intake area was engineered to make beings feel things, which Aldric considered a hostile act.

Soft warm light. A fountain. A ceiling that turned with slow reassurance, as if the station itself were patting the arrivals on the head. He crossed it at a working pace, credentials out, and let the many-armed attendant process him while the room’s ambient joy broke against the last notch and ran off it, finding nothing to hold.

It cost him. It always cost him. That was the arithmetic nobody put in the threat assessments: the flood was constant, the wall was manual, and every hour of holding it cost him something no one saw. He had been paying since he was seventeen. He had gotten so fluent in the paying that he could stand in a lobby designed to open hearts and feel nothing at all except the pressure of everyone else’s.

“Guard Aldric. Vorjan House delegation.” The attendant slid his chip back. “You’re expected. Quarters on the residence level. And—” She offered a second chip, pink-edged and ceremonially unnecessary. “—the Intergalactic Dating Agency welcomes you, and Administrator Re-lee asks me to say she is delighted, and that your intake appointment will be scheduled at the earliest⁠—”

“I know how the process works.”

“She said you’d say that,” the attendant said, with the serenity of a being reading from a script it found charming, “and asked me to say: wonderful.”

Aldric took both chips and walked away before the conversation could develop further.

His quarters were grey. Standard. A bunk, a desk, a viewport the size of a serving tray, walls the exact featureless color of every wall he’d been issued in twenty years of service. He set his kit down, unpacked it in four minutes — armor stand, blade kit, the folded formal blues he would not need — then took out the last item and set it on the desk, squared to the edge.

The rejection paperwork.

The agency filed everything electronically, of course. Re-lee’s office would process the data card at the end of the window with three taps and a radiant smile. But Vorjan House kept paper for oaths, because paper had weight and weight was the point, and Aldric had drawn up the formal instrument of refusal before he ever boarded the transport, in his own hand, with the house seal already pressed into the corner.

Thirty days from now, he would sign it, and the absurd episode would be over.

He looked at it for a moment — proof, squared to the edge of the desk, that there was nothing here the database could do to him. Whatever name they announced, whoever she was, the ending was already written. There was a comfort in that. He’d built his whole life out of endings already written.

Then he sat down and cleaned a blade that did not need cleaning until the worst of the station’s noise faded to a kind of weather he could ignore.

He had to eat. That was the flaw in every fortification: the garrison had to eat.

The dining hall was on the commons level, and he heard it before he reached it — not through the cuff, through the air. Voices of a dozen species, the ring of cookware, a bell somewhere marking something, and under all of it a smell that reached out into the corridor and took hold of him with a familiarity that had no right to exist this far from any world.

Bread. Char. Something braised dark and slow, spice he could not name, fat and smoke and time.

He stopped in the corridor. A Paxian family flowed around him, complaining cheerfully about something. He identified, with the cold precision he brought to threat assessment, that his mouth had begun to water, and he filed the fact as an ambush.

The hall itself was full and loud and warm. Long tables, mixed seating, a serving line staffed by beings of at least four species moving with drilled economy under strings of small lights that served no structural purpose whatsoever. He took a tray. He took what was offered — the braised thing, the flatbread, a scatter of charred roots glazed in something dark — chose the corner table with the best sightlines and the wall at his back, and sat.

The room’s noise pressed on the last notch. Contentment, mostly. A hall full of species who did not shield a single thought among them, all of them briefly, stupidly happy for the same reason, which was dinner. He set his walls against it out of habit.

Then he ate.

The first bite stopped him the way a blow stops a man who walked into it.

It was — he put the fork down, then picked it up again. The braise was dark and deep and had been someone’s whole afternoon; the char on the roots was deliberate, exact, bitterness laid against the glaze like a blade laid against a whetstone, each making the other matter. The flatbread had been made by hands, today, and it tasted like —

It tasted like a full house. Cousins underfoot. A kitchen with someone in it who wanted you fed.

Aldric sat in the corner of a crowded dining hall on a foreign station, twenty-two days of transit from the world where anyone had last cooked for him with intent, and did not permit one muscle of his face to move.

He ate all of it. Methodically. The way a soldier eats — fuel, nothing further, a man discharging a biological requirement. If he took the flatbread last, and slower, that was logistics. If he sat for a moment afterward with his hand flat on the table beside the empty tray, that was fatigue from transit, and nothing else.

Across the hall, behind the serving line, someone laughed at something — a warm, unhurried sound, briefly clear above the noise of the room.

He did not look up. He filed the meal as adequate, returned the tray, and walked back to his grey quarters past the pink-edged glow of the agency office, where a scheduling notice was already waiting for him, radiant, regarding his intake.

Thirty days, he told himself, and squared the paperwork to the edge of the desk again, though it had not moved.

The intake appointment could not be avoided. He had tried; the scheduling system had regenerated the appointment twice, each iteration accompanied by a message of escalating radiance, and on the third day he concluded that the only way through the Intergalactic Dating Agency was through it.