Chapter 18 - The Handoff

Nathaniel now knew which shelf had the good cups.

The good cups were on the second shelf, left side, behind a small stack of maintenance manuals that Jazmine kept there because it was the one place Eric reliably did not dig through looking for something to read. The cups on the first shelf were for whoever was awake first and not particularly selective, which was usually him. The cups on the second shelf were for occasions, which he'd learned meant whenever Jazmine decided it was an occasion, with no consistent external criteria.

Eric was horizontal on the sleeping shelf eating something that was not his and had not been offered to him. He had established, over six weeks of semi-regular occupancy, a comfortable personal relationship with whatever Jazmine's shelf held, on the operating principle that she would tell him to stop if she wanted him to stop and she had not yet done so. This was his logic. It had not yet failed him. Nathaniel found it structurally admirable.

Jazmine was at the burner.

He was in the chair that had appeared, at some point in the last two weeks, in the corner near the single air recycler. It had not been there on their first visit. It fit the space with a precision that suggested it had been measured for. He had not commented on this. He sat in the chair now with his legs stretched out and thought about the comm message from last night and watched Jazmine's back and wondered what meeting someone properly meant when the person doing the meeting was Jazmine.

"We're going to the market," she said, without turning around.

Eric sat up. He had a gift for waking from any position with full situational awareness, which had served them both on the upper decks and served them considerably better below. "Which market."

"Same one."

"When?"

"Now." She turned and handed him a cup. Second shelf. He took it without comment, which meant he'd also worked out the cup system at some point without mentioning it.

They grabbed their things the way you grab your things when you know the route.

---

The walk to the market had stopped being a navigation exercise and become a commute. Nathaniel could do the tunnel junctions in the dark, which he knew because he had once done them in the dark, during an unplanned power interruption on Deck 9 that Jazmine had navigated without breaking stride and that he and Eric had navigated by staying one step behind her and not making sounds she would find annoying.

His hand went to the small of her back at the narrow junction without him deciding to put it there. She didn't acknowledge it. The corridor opened and he moved it and they came out into the wider passage that ran toward the Deck 12 market, and Eric was already three steps ahead of them, scanning the stalls with the predatory focus of someone who had found that lower-deck goods required faster decisions than upper-deck equivalents and had recalibrated accordingly.

The market was running. It ran at all hours with different densities, the early rest-cycle crowd thinner and more purposeful, people who knew what they needed and moved for it. Nathaniel recognized three faces. One of them, a woman with a tool harness who ran a water-filtration components stall, recognized him back and gave him the nod that meant he had become, if not a known quantity, at least a recurring one.

He had been given a nod by a lower-deck stall operator. He'd thought about writing it down somewhere. He had not written it down because Eric would have seen it and been insufferable.

Jazmine steered them left at the central junction.

Not their usual exit. The usual exit went toward the residential cluster and her apartment. This one went toward the far end of the market, the section with the older stalls, the ones that had been here long enough that the tables had developed the worn quality of surfaces carrying goods since before the current operators were born.

Nathaniel noticed. He didn't ask.

---

Leila was there.

Not browsing. She had a seedling under one arm, in a small growing container made of repurposed pressurized tubing, soil visible at the rim. She was standing near the junction of two table rows with no expression Nathaniel could read: present, still, her attention unfocused and therefore probably total. He had the uncomfortable certainty that she had been there for a while and had been watching them come down the aisle.

She looked at them the way she had looked at them the first night in Jazmine's quarters: inventory, complete, unhurried. Except that first night she'd had one reading of them, the raw data of two upper-deckers in the wrong part of the ship, uncertain and trying not to show it. Now she had six weeks of follow-up data. Additional observations. Confirmed hypotheses and possibly a few surprises, though Leila's face would not have told you which category any given data point fell into.

"You boys have been having fun," she said.

Her voice was even. Accurate, in the register of someone stating a verified conclusion.

Nathaniel opened his mouth.

She looked at him. Not a warning exactly: a look that contained, in concentrated form, six weeks' worth of her assessment of his approach to situations that called for more information and less performance. He closed his mouth.

She looked at Jazmine.

Something moved between them. Not warm, not the easy shorthand of the apartment when they were all together and Leila's wit was running at full speed and Jazmine was laughing her actual laugh. They held each other's eyes for a beat too long to be casual.

Jazmine gave a small nod. Not a concession: an acknowledgment. She didn't look surprised.

Leila looked back at them.

Whatever she was about to say had been settled before they reached her. Nathaniel knew that much from the stillness of her, the way she had already turned.

He was also aware that he did not know what the decision was.

Eric had gone still in the way he went still when he was modeling risk variables: hands quiet, shoulders loose, his attention on everything without seeming to track any one thing. He was watching Leila and watching Jazmine and doing his internal arithmetic. Whatever he came up with he kept to himself, which meant he'd found an uncertainty he couldn't resolve without more data.

The seedling shifted under Leila's arm. She adjusted her grip without looking down. She turned to go.

Nathaniel waited.

"Come find me tomorrow." A pause, her back to them, not looking back. "Junction 9-C. Seven rest-cycle." Another pause that was not quite long enough to be comfortable. "Don't be late."

She walked. The market crowd absorbed her. The platinum bob disappeared around the far end of the table row and she was gone.

Jazmine looked at neither of them for a moment, which was a choice. Then she looked at the seedling space Leila had been standing in, then at Nathaniel.

"She likes you," she said.

He thought about what he'd just witnessed. "That's what that looks like."

"For her." She started walking back toward the main exit. "That's what it looks like for her."

Eric caught up from Nathaniel's left. His voice, when it came, was in the register he used when he had reached a conclusion he wasn't pleased about but couldn't argue with. "She's been running an assessment this whole time."

"Yes," Jazmine said.

"And this is her result."

"Part of it."

Eric looked at Nathaniel. Nathaniel looked at the middle distance and thought about junction 9-C and seven rest-cycle and a woman who had just made a decision about them without consulting anyone, because consulting anyone would have implied the decision wasn't already hers to make.

"Don't be late," Eric said.

"I heard her."

"I'm saying it again so you hear it twice."