Chapter 2 - The Plan

The plan, such as it was, began with Nathaniel's wardrobe.

This was Eric's first mistake. Not the plan itself, not the question he had asked while Nathaniel's ceiling was still doing its warm white composite nothing, not even the schematic Eric had found the next morning filed under a heading so tediously named that nobody had clicked it in what the access log suggested was approximately eleven years. The mistake was letting Nathaniel open the wardrobe.

---

"This one," Nathaniel said.

Eric looked at the shirt. "No."

"It's dark."

"It has a decorative panel."

Nathaniel turned the shirt over. The decorative panel was subtle, a narrow band of embossed weave along the collar, invisible to someone who did not know where to look. He looked at it for a moment. Then he looked at the eleven other shirts Eric had already rejected, most of them in a pile on the floor because the closet management system kept trying to refold them and Eric kept pulling them back out.

"Nobody's looking at the collar," Nathaniel said.

"Everybody on a lower deck is looking at the collar." Eric took the shirt from him and held it up. The light from the room's ambient panel caught the embossed weave and made it shimmer faintly. "That's textile processing. That costs more than a lower-decker earns in six months. Put it down."

Nathaniel put it down. He stood in his open wardrobe in his undershirt and thought, not for the first time, that his entire wardrobe was a problem. Not because it was excessive. Because it was precisely, comprehensively, upper-deck. Every piece of fabric had been selected by someone who understood quality as a social signal. The shirts signaled. The trousers signaled. Even the underclothes, he realized with mild despair, probably signaled something, though he hoped that particular signal was private.

"What about yours?" he said.

Eric was already unbuttoning something from his own side of the closet. He had, somehow, materialized a garment that looked like it had been through a maintenance cycle or six. Dark grey, slightly worn at the elbows, no visible branding and no decorative weave. He held it up. The fit was wrong for him, too loose in the shoulders, which was the point.

"Where did you get that," Nathaniel said.

"It was in the spare compartment from when I did the physical systems training. You get issued clothes."

"You took them home."

"I was nineteen." Eric shrugged into it. The shoulder seam dropped past his actual shoulder. The cuffs were slightly frayed. He looked like a plausible facsimile of someone who had once met a lower-decker. "I didn't know I was saving them for anything. Apparently I was saving them for this."

Nathaniel looked at him for a long moment. The shirt was genuinely terrible. It was also, somehow, effective. Eric in the wrong clothes looked like a man who had places to be and would not stop to explain himself. Nathaniel in the wrong clothes would look like Nathaniel in a costume.

"I need something from the supply deck," Nathaniel said.

"We're not stopping at the supply deck. We're going now, before either of us thinks about it long enough to make a sensible decision."

That was fair. Nathaniel pulled out the least decorated shirt he owned. Dark, a plain weave selected specifically for restraint. Eric held it up against his chest. They both looked at it.

The collar was fine. The cut was the problem. It was tailored in a way that announced, in fluent textile language, that the body inside it had never been required to do anything urgent.

"It's what I have," Nathaniel said.

Eric sighed the sigh of a man who had already modeled the failure modes of this plan and had decided to proceed anyway, which was different from optimism but sometimes produced similar outcomes. He adjusted the collar himself, tugging it slightly, rumpling the placket in a way that looked accidental but was methodical. His fingers were at Nathaniel's throat for a moment, tucking and pulling, arranging.

Nathaniel watched Eric's face while he worked. This was a habit. He had always watched Eric's face because Eric's face reported data before his mouth did: the precise set of his brows when he was running numbers, the small compression of his lips when the numbers came out wrong. Right now his face said focused and mildly resigned, which were two of Eric's most reliable expressions and which meant, in combination, that he had committed to this and was making peace with his own commitment.

His hands were warm. They had always been warm.

"Better," Eric said, stepping back. He looked Nathaniel over. "Worse than me. We'll have to move fast so nobody looks too hard."

"People look at me."

"That's the problem."

"I meant in a complimentary way."

"I know what you meant." Eric turned back to the closet, retrieved a second pair of trousers from his own section, passed them over. "Try these. They're slightly too short for you, which is the correct direction."

The trousers were, indeed, slightly too short. They sat at the ankle in a way that revealed his boots, which were also a problem, resoled professionally on a schedule, and they showed it. He looked down at them. There was nothing to be done about the boots.

"Ship records," Eric said, already moving to his comm. He had pulled up the schematic on his secondary screen, the one Nathaniel had watched him find two hours ago, standing over Eric's shoulder while Eric scrolled through a document labeled JUNCTION MAINTENANCE ACCESS: CORR-7 SUPPLEMENTAL FILING — ADMINISTRATIVE HOLD. It was filed between two other documents with equally compelling titles. Nobody had accessed it. There was a small notation in the corner from eleven years ago indicating that the access revision had been submitted but not yet acted upon, which in ship bureaucratic terms meant it had been forgotten about entirely, which in Nathaniel's terms meant nobody had changed the code.

The code that opened the junction hatch in Corridor 7 was still in the public supplemental filing. It was just buried under eleven years of administrative indifference.

Eric had copied it to a card.

"Corridor 7," he said, "is two turns from here. The junction accesses the maintenance spine. From the maintenance spine we go down twelve decks via the service ladder system, which is technically a fire egress route and technically not access-restricted during this part of the sleep cycle."

"Technically."

"A lot of this is technically."

"That's fine," Nathaniel said. "I like technically."

Eric looked at him with an expression that landed somewhere between fondness and the dry foreknowledge that he was going to be standing in a tunnel in two hours wondering how he had gotten there. "I know," he said. "That's also the problem."

---

They went at second bell of the sleep cycle, when the corridor's ambient lighting had cycled down to quarter-power and the food dispensary at the end of Corridor 7 had shuttered its service window. Two other residents passed them on the way: an older woman in a governance-family robe who did not look up from her comm, and a maintenance tech heading the opposite direction with a tool satchel over his shoulder. The tech glanced at them once. Neither of them was doing anything wrong, yet. They were still two upper-deck men walking in a corridor where upper-deck men walked.

Nathaniel felt the back of his neck prickle anyway.

The junction hatch was set flush into the wall, almost invisible unless you were looking for it, a seam in the paneling with a recessed lock, easy to miss on a casual inspection. He was not on a casual inspection. He had the spatial layout memorized from the schematic: 2.3 meters from the floor junction to the wall mount, panel seam at shoulder height, sensor housing above it. He had Eric's card in his hand before they reached it.

Eric held the corridor entrance. Nathaniel pressed the card to the sensor.

The lock released with a soft, resigned click, like something that had been waiting eleven years for someone to finally ask.

He pulled the hatch open.

The smell hit them first.

The most violent thing about it was the absence of lavender. The upper deck smelled of the particular calibrated nothing the ventilation produced: lavender and bergamot, the soft chemical edges of a compound he had known for eight months was not natural. This air smelled of metal and the biological residue of many people living in a space that had not been optimized for their comfort. Heat and something sharp underneath, like electrical current in a small space running at full load.

It smelled, Nathaniel thought, like something was actually happening down there.

Eric appeared at his shoulder. Nathaniel watched him breathe it in, watched the almost-imperceptible widening of his eyes before Eric caught it and smoothed his expression back to its working state.

"Well," Eric said.

"Yeah," Nathaniel said.

They looked at each other. Nathaniel's heart was doing something entirely irregular and he was choosing to interpret this as a positive development. He thought about the ceiling. He thought about forty-five minutes scheduled in advance and the ventilation's constant precise nothing and the orgasm that had arrived without ceremony and the word below in his father's governance meeting and the way he had felt, lying there afterward, like a man who was bored of his own life and had not known it.

He put his hand on the ladder and started down.

They were twenty years old and invincible and completely wrong about that last part.