Chapter 23 - The Conversation That Doesn't Happen

Eric came back at a later hour than he said he would.

Nathaniel had been at Jazmine's for the better part of three hours, which had involved a gray-market bottle of something allegedly distilled from nutrient supplement base that Jazmine claimed was actually quite good once you committed to it. It was not quite good. It was functional, which in the lower decks was a higher compliment anyway. Jazmine had fallen asleep with her braids across the pillow and her mouth slightly open and one hand still loosely curved around a cup that had been empty for forty minutes. She was, Nathaniel had decided, the most thoroughly asleep person he had ever watched. No performing unconsciousness. Just: gone.

He was sitting against the wall of the sleeping shelf, legs out, doing nothing in particular, when the door opened.

Eric came in. He looked around the room once, registered Jazmine's state, and crossed to the sleeping shelf and dropped down next to Nathaniel with the complete lack of ceremony of someone who had been doing this since they were sixteen. His back went against Nathaniel's chest. Nathaniel's arm went across him, over his chest, the automatic geography of years. Neither of them arranged it. It was just where they ended up.

The apartment was warm. The rest-cycle lamps were low and amber and slightly unfocused in the way of fixtures that had been running at this setting long enough that the diffuser surface had fogged. Outside: the ship's hum, ever-present, the continuous low note underneath everything on the lower decks, louder here than on Deck 2, the sound of a thing that was working.

A full minute passed without either of them saying anything.

Nathaniel did not ask where Eric had been. He knew where Eric had been. Eric knew he knew. The silence between people who have been talking to each other every day for years carries everything that doesn't need saying.

"The market on Deck 9," Eric said eventually. "The one near the secondary junction. Did you go?"

"Once. Leila brought me."

"What did you think?"

Nathaniel thought about it. The market was a long, low-ceilinged space that ran along what should have been a maintenance access corridor and had been converted at some point into something else entirely, stalls built from repurposed materials and lit by improvised lamps running on whatever was available. The smell: cooking oil and something chemical and skin and the warm plastic smell of materials that had been lived around for a long time. The noise: dense, packed with transaction and argument and laughter in a space sized for none of it.

"Loud," he said. "Interesting. Someone tried to sell me a coupling tool. I didn't know what it was. I said I wasn't in the market. She seemed personally offended."

Eric made a short sound that was a laugh. His shoulders moved slightly.

"Leila charged us double the first night," Eric said. "Did you know that?"

"I figured. Seemed right."

"Yeah."

The amber light moved through its long pulse. Jazmine's breathing from across the room was deep and unhurried. The ship hummed. Nathaniel had his chin on top of Eric's head, which was a position he'd arrived at without deciding to and had not adjusted because it was comfortable and because Eric had not moved.

Eric was different. Not gone, not absent. Nathaniel had been expecting absent, the slightly-hollowed quality of someone who had spent something they weren't sure they wanted to spend, the careful recalibration of a person coming back from something. It wasn't that. Eric was more present than usual, if anything. Denser, somehow. More settled. Nathaniel did not know what to call what he was seeing. He set it down.

"Leila said something," Eric said. "Last week. About the Deck 11 junction."

"Which one?"

"The split one. Where the secondary atmospheric comes in." He shifted slightly, his hand finding Nathaniel's forearm, settling there. Not going anywhere. "She said the routing was original installation. No modification for fifty years. She said if it fails the filtration degradation would be measurable within a week."

"Is that a threat or an observation?"

"Both, probably."

Nathaniel thought about that. He ran his fingers along the hair at the back of Eric's neck, the idle gesture of years, and thought about Leila and what she said when she was being informative and what she said when she was being strategic and whether those were different things or the same thing dressed differently.

"She's got a route mapped," Nathaniel said. "Through Deck 11. I don't know where it goes."

"James does."

A small pause. Not weighted. Just: there it was, out in the room.

Nathaniel did not say anything for a moment. He was aware of Eric's forearm under his hand, the warmth of him, the way his breathing had not changed when he said it. Nathaniel thought about what he knew about James Okoye, which was: a brief introduction in a corridor, a reputation for competence so thorough it preceded him like weather, and the fact that Eric had been coming back from below looking like someone who had been given something they did not have before.

"The route Leila mapped," Eric said. "I've been working it out in my head. It goes through the 13-C junction."

"Which connects to?"

"The Belly."

Nathaniel knew The Belly. He had been there twice, neither time in circumstances that encouraged map-making. He tried to work out the geometry of a route from the Deck 11 atmospheric junction to the access point for The Belly and concluded that Eric had been building a very detailed internal map of a section of the ship they were not supposed to know existed.

"You've been planning something," Nathaniel said.

Eric's hand pressed slightly on his forearm. Not agreeing, not deflecting. Just: I'm still here.

Nathaniel put his chin back on top of Eric's head.

The lamp dimmed on its rest-cycle automatic by another degree, the room going slightly warmer in color. Jazmine had not moved. Outside: the hum of the ship, the faint sound of pressure through the walls, someone three apartments over doing something that involved a rhythmic sound at low volume, stopping, starting again.

Nathaniel thought about the lower decks and what they were doing to his sense of the ship. He had grown up with a model of this vessel as a thing with a top and a middle and a bottom, the top being where governance happened and the bottom being where the infrastructure went. He knew this model was incomplete. He had always known it was incomplete in the way you know something you have not been asked to examine closely. The lower decks were making him examine it closely. He was not entirely sure what to do with what he was finding.

He was going to have to do something with it eventually. He could feel that.

Not tonight.

Eric's weight against his chest was familiar and warm. The apartment smelled of something spiced and low-deck and the slightly chemical sweetness of whatever Jazmine had in her hair. Nathaniel had been breathing this air for three hours and he thought, again, that the smoothness on Deck 2 was chemically produced and had nothing to do with calm.

The lamp dimmed again.

Eric said, into the dark: "James wants us both at The Belly on Thursday."

Not explaining who James was. Not explaining anything else either. The words arrived in the dark room like something that had been prepared and held and was now, simply, placed.

Nathaniel's arm tightened slightly across Eric's chest. Not alarm. Just: felt.

"Okay," he said.

They stayed like that until the lamp went to its lowest cycle and the room was just amber edge and dark and the sound of the ship carrying them forward through the nothing between here and wherever they were going.