Chapter 25 - The Morning After

Three in the morning is its own country inside a ship. The lower residential decks go quiet at mid-rest-cycle, the corridor lights drop to their lowest amber, the checkpoint activity drops to minimum staffing. The maintenance tunnels heading upward get cold in the way that tunnels get cold when the heat source is below you and you are climbing away from it: the thermal bleed from the drive systems does not follow you up the gradient. It pools in the lower sections and stays there.

They were still damp.

Not uncomfortably, but definitively: the damp that comes from an extended stay in warm water and does not fully resolve with a ten-minute towel and a tunnel walk in the wrong ambient temperature. Nathaniel's shirt was sticking to his back in a way that would stop being interesting in about twenty minutes and start being annoying. Eric's hair was doing things. Neither of them commented on either of these facts.

They walked without urgency.

"James's stock or Jazmine's?" Eric said.

Nathaniel looked at the tunnel wall, where someone had marked a junction number in yellow stencil that had been re-marked twice over the years, the layers visible if you looked closely. "Jazmine's. She's got a different source. The aftertaste is different."

"You're wrong. That aftertaste is the base compound. James's stock uses a cleaner filtering run. The aftertaste from bad filtering is more astringent."

"I don't know what astringent tastes like."

"Yes you do. You just don't call it that."

Nathaniel thought about the gray-market bottle and what it tasted like and whether astringent was the word. He decided astringent was too precise for something that tasted primarily like a decision you'd made. "It's Jazmine's. She had it before James was in the rotation."

"Doesn't mean she didn't get the stock from him."

"Doesn't mean she did."

"How would you know the difference?"

"I asked her," Nathaniel said. "She told me it was hers. I believe her."

Eric's expression shifted: skeptical, moderate, not unkind, not ready to concede. "She also told you The Belly had no roof."

"She was joking."

"She wasn't joking."

Nathaniel thought about the gantry above the water and the drive-glow and what it was like to look up through the water while you were in it and see the gantry as though from below. Jazmine had said no roof. She had meant something real by it. He was still working out what exactly. "Fine. She was making a point."

"There's a difference."

"Yes, thank you, Eric."

They walked. The tunnel amplified their footsteps and nothing else: just the two of them, the ship's underlying hum, the faint sound of water through the secondary pipe that ran alongside this section from Deck 12 to Deck 9. Nathaniel had been hearing this pipe for six weeks and had only recently learned what it was carrying and where.

He noticed Eric reading the junctions as they passed.

Not navigating. Eric knew this route. He was reading the junction markers the way you read something you intend to remember rather than use now, his eyes pausing at each number and moving on. Nathaniel watched it for half a corridor.

He said nothing.

His arm went around Eric's shoulders somewhere in the fourth junction section, the way it always did when they were walking somewhere cold, automatic as breathing. Eric leaned into it without adjusting his pace. His shoulder was warm against Nathaniel's side. They were the same height and they had been walking side by side since they were adolescents and the arm-around-shoulders position was as natural as any other configuration they occupied.

The tunnel narrowed at the 11-C junction. They went single file, Nathaniel behind, the corridor tight enough that he had to angle slightly sideways. On the other side it widened and his arm went back across Eric's shoulders. Easy. Habitual.

Eric said, without being asked: "That one goes to Deck 13. Comes out near the reclamation access."

He had tilted his head slightly toward a side junction they had just passed. His voice was neutral, informative, the voice of someone relaying a route.

Nathaniel nodded. He had not been going to ask.

He was thinking about James's hand on the back of his neck. The weight of it. He had been thinking about it in the water and in the getting-out process and now here, walking the cold tunnel with his arm around Eric's shoulders. He could not put it down.

He did not say this.

They stopped once. Not for a reason. The way people stop who have been walking together long enough to have their pacing synchronized: both of them stopping at the same moment without deciding to, as if the shared cadence had briefly arrived at a pause. They stood there in the dim corridor light. The ship hummed around them. The pipe carried water through the wall. The ambient amber made their breath faintly visible.

Nathaniel looked at the ceiling of the tunnel. The ceiling was close. Everything down here was close. He had found this claustrophobic at first and then interesting and now he barely registered it. The proximity of walls had stopped being a fact and had become a texture, something you inhabited rather than endured.

He thought about what Deck 2 was going to smell like when they got back. The lavender that wasn't lavender. The filtered air that was so consistently filtered that it registered as nothing, as the absence of smell, which he used to think was just what air was.

He did not want to go back yet.

He did want to go back eventually. He was not going to pretend he didn't want a night's sleep in a bed and a meal that didn't require navigating a gray-market exchange. But the wanting to go back and the not-wanting-yet were both true, and he was learning to hold both without one canceling the other.

They kept walking.

The last section was the coldest, the thermal gradient most pronounced at the upper end of the climb, the air coming from the transition zone between lower and upper decks, different in the mouth and at the back of the throat, the shift between systems. Nathaniel felt it at his neck and his wrists and welcomed it because he was still too warm from the water.

The hatch was ahead.

Eric stopped. His hand went to the latch and stayed there, not turning. He stood in front of the hatch with his back to Nathaniel, and Nathaniel waited, because Eric sometimes needed a moment at the end of things, the beat of time that let the last few hours settle before the new context began.

"I'm going back tomorrow," Eric said.

Not asking. Stating. The voice of someone telling you a fact about themselves, a thing that is simply true and has been decided and does not require negotiation.

Nathaniel looked at the hatch, the familiar metal, the specific weld line he had been using as a landmark for six weeks. "I know," he said.

Eric turned the latch.

They went up.