Chapter 45 - The Upper Deck Problem

The security query was still on the desk when the room went dark.

Not literally on the desk: Eric had flipped the comm face-down hours ago. But it was there in the room the way the query had been there every time Nathaniel walked past the desk since Eric pulled it up. The upper-deck silence, which was supposed to be peaceful, which was engineered to be peaceful, was just giving the query room to sit in.

He was on his back staring at the ceiling.

Eric was on his side, facing the wall. He was not asleep. Eric on his side and facing away did not sound the same as Eric asleep, and Nathaniel had sixteen years of comparison data on this point.

The climate system ran at its optimal level. The ventilation moved air through the room at a rate that was, per ship health protocol, exactly what human lungs required. The temperature was two degrees above the lower-deck average, which was not a lot, which was the length of the world.

He did not think about the query.

He thought about six people on a cold floor. Jazmine's weight against him, her warmth, different from the warmth of the room. Anastasia's instructions, measured and exact, the architecture first and then the execution. The corner of her mouth.

Then he stopped thinking about the observation bay because thinking about it in this room, in this silence, was doing something to the room he couldn't fix.

He had been back for one full day cycle. He had eaten in the breakfast hall, and walked the upper corridor, and sat in his quarters, and performed his father's son at the breakfast table for four minutes. He had done all of these things and they had all worked. Nobody had looked at him differently. Nobody had seen anything.

The coat still fit, from the outside.

He was aware that this was the problem.

Eric's hand found his arm in the dark.

Not a signal, not an initiation with any architecture behind it: a hand finding something solid in a room that felt wrong. Nathaniel felt it on his forearm, the weight and warmth of it, and then the hand moved to his shoulder and closed there.

He turned toward Eric.

What happened next was its own kind of education, and the narrator would like to note, for the record, that the upper deck had nothing to do with it.

There was no structure in this. No one setting terms, no class line running underneath everything like drive vibration. Just Eric, who had been half of everything Nathaniel had done for twenty years, holding his shoulder in the dark because the room felt wrong.

They undressed without turning the light on.

Nathaniel pulled Eric's shirt up and off and got his palm flat against Eric's sternum, feeling the heat of his skin, the rise and fall of his chest. Eric's hands were already working Nathaniel's shirt loose, sliding it up, and then those hands were against his ribs and he stopped tracking the temperature in the room.

Eric's mouth found his collarbone. Nathaniel got a fist in the curls at the back of Eric's head and held on.

He had the full working knowledge of this body: the warm brown skin of his shoulders, the flush that came up on his cheekbones when things were going well, where he was sensitive. Eric's mouth moved against his throat and Nathaniel breathed in hard through his nose and pressed his other palm flat against the muscle of Eric's shoulder blade.

Okay.

His belt went next. Eric's. Then his own. The metal was cold against his fingers and then he forgot about it.

He had his hand on Eric's hip, the specific angle of it, the bone he had mapped by feel across months of encounters. He pulled him closer. Eric's mouth had moved from his throat to the edge of his jaw, doing something unhurried there, while his hands moved down Nathaniel's stomach. Nathaniel's internal monologue, which had been running commentary for twenty minutes, stopped sending dispatches.

Eric's hand closed around him. Nathaniel pressed his forehead against Eric's temple and held very still.

He knew exactly how to return this. He did it. Eric made a sound against his cheek, something low and unguarded that did not travel past the walls, and Nathaniel felt it land in his chest before he'd processed what it was.

Eric's hips moved. Nathaniel adjusted his grip, working slowly, and Eric put his face against Nathaniel's shoulder and stayed there. He could feel him: the heat of Eric's skin, the damp where their arms were pressed together, the flex and shudder of the muscle across his back when Nathaniel got the angle right.

He was also aware of Eric's hand, which had not stopped. He was aware of this with some precision.

He stopped thinking in sentences.

Eric came first, Nathaniel's name in a low register, one syllable, barely more than breath. It did not travel past the room. Nathaniel felt it happen under his palm: the pulse of it, the shudder through Eric's whole back.

Then him, Eric's forehead still against his shoulder, the weight of it.

After.

They stayed close. Eric's arm across his chest. Neither of them spoke. The arm was warm and real and had weight, and under it Nathaniel looked at the ceiling that was the wrong color in the dark.

Eric's breathing slowed. Evened out. He was asleep in minutes, which was how he always was: fast out, all the way in. The arm didn't move. It was heavy, and it was his, and it was fine.

Nathaniel looked at the ceiling.

He thought about the security query. Three queries on the same junction in eight weeks, all at the same clearance level, all closed without action. He had been turning that phrase over since Eric showed him the screen, looking for the angle where it became less than it was. He had not found it.

He thought about Leila, logging queries she hadn't told them about. One query is noise; you wait for the pattern before you build a case. She had the pattern now.

He thought about the drone rotation. He ran the count in his head without deciding to, forward from the last logged position, estimating the elapsed time from the current feeling of the hour. The drone was at the far end. Due back past his end in approximately thirty-four minutes.

He stopped himself.

He was lying in his own bed with Eric's arm on his chest running a surveillance drone count in his head at two in the morning.

He was aware of how long this had been going on. Not the drone count: the whole of it. How many weeks of lower-deck air and maintenance tunnel routes and the names and patterns of six different people's bodies and the operational infrastructure of a gray-market network and a security query log and Jazmine's laugh and Anastasia's accent in the soft vowel of his name. How much of it he could carry now without effort.

He thought: thirty years is a long time to keep a secret.

He hadn't meant to think that. It arrived fully formed, from somewhere behind the drone count, and sat in the room and he could not find where to put it.

Thirty years. The ship's voyage, which was not yet halfway complete, which would not be complete in his lifetime or in his children's lifetime or in his children's children's. The generation they were: the middle ones, born after departure and dead before arrival. The ones the ship was keeping. The ones who had been born into the managed silence and the calibrated air and the smooth and the breakfast hall and the biometric log and the four-minute conversation with a father who meant well and noticed nothing.

The ones who were supposed to not know what was three decks below them.

He thought about the viewport in the observation bay. Scratched from decades of hands and faces pressing against it to see the drives. Who had built the ship, who maintained it, who kept the drives running. Who had pressed their faces against that polycarbonate and looked at the same blue-white engine glow in the years before he was born and who would be pressing their faces against it in the years after he was gone.

The apartment on Deck 2. The wellness coordinator. The carpet.

Jazmine's hands, which had calluses.

He thought about whether it was possible to go back.

Not to before he'd come below: that door was closed, the map was in him, the people were real. He meant back to the version of himself who would have found the wellness coordinator reasonable, who would have managed four minutes with his father and let the smooth and the managed silence close around those four minutes and seal them in.

He thought: no. Probably not.

He thought: and what does that mean.

He did not arrive at an answer. He lay under Eric's arm and looked at the ceiling and let the not-answer sit with the other things that didn't have answers yet, the growing pile of them, the collection he was accumulating without knowing when he'd have enough to know what to do.

The drone came past the viewport.

He had known it was coming. He had known the exact minute it would come. He watched the edge of its light pass the frame of the viewport and fade, and he thought: I am going to need to tell them about the count.

Not tonight. Not tonight, specifically, because Eric was asleep and the room was quiet and this was the wrong time.

But soon.

Some things could wait until morning. He lay still under Eric's arm and looked at the ceiling and thought about what morning was going to require, and whether he was going to be the same person at morning that he was at this moment. He probably was. That was probably okay.

The ceiling was still the wrong color.

He was beginning to think it always would be.