Chapter 49 - The Jealousy Problem

Jazmine had food.

She had gotten it from somewhere in her network, as she always got things from somewhere in her network, and it was warm and it was considerably better than the ration pack standard and it sat on the small table in her quarters like an argument for staying. The room smelled of it, and of the herbal something she kept on the top shelf, dry and faintly sweet, a smell that belonged to someone who had chosen it, and of the specific warm closeness of four people who had just come in from a corridor run and were still processing their body chemistry.

Nathaniel sat on the edge of her bed, because there were only two chairs and a crate and Eric had the crate and he had done the math on the hierarchy of aching shoulders. He was still testing the range of motion in his left arm. The conduit bracket had given him a bruise that was going to be a specific shade of interesting by morning.

Jazmine was watching him do this. Her expression had the practical focus she wore when she was assessing something, and underneath it something else that he could not read from this angle.

"You need a cold compress," she said.

"I need not to have run into a conduit bracket at speed."

"You need both."

She went to the small utility alcove in her quarters and came back with a cloth pack cooled from the environmental unit. She handed it to him. He put it on his shoulder and felt the immediate opinion it had about the bruise and said nothing polite about it.

In the corner, Anastasia sat with her back to the wall and her knees drawn up, watching the room. She had been in this configuration since they arrived, the diagnostic stillness that sometimes registered as mere quietness and sometimes registered as something else. Right now Nathaniel did not have the bandwidth to read which.

He was thinking about the checkpoint guard and the wrong denomination and Leila's debrief in the alcove and the ten-minute head start she'd had, and running the same calculations he'd been running since the observation bay in parallel with the bruise and the cold compress and the smell of real food.

He was thinking about who knew their route.

He was thinking about this when Jazmine said: "James is being careful with himself."

She said it to the room. She was not looking at Eric; she was looking at the table, at the food she was distributing onto the small plates. Her voice was the warm, slightly worried register she used when she was processing something out loud.

"He doesn't do that." She set a plate in front of Nathaniel. "Open up. He doesn't let people in. In eight years, I have watched him let three people in, and two of them are me and Leila." She handed a plate to Eric. "I've never seen him look at someone the way he looked at you at the observation bay."

She said it the way she said things: without cruelty, without armor. Just the thing.

Eric said: "I know what I'm doing."

A beat. Too quick.

Jazmine looked at him. She had said what she had seen. That was all she had said.

"I didn't say—"

"James is not someone you manage from a distance," Eric said. His voice had the particular quality it got when he was building a model under stress: careful, sequential, each word doing structural work. "I understand that. I have not been managing it from a distance."

Jazmine looked at him. She was not backing down. She was also not getting louder, not escalating: she was doing the lower-deck thing where the voice goes quieter and the precision increases. "James has been hurt before. Quietly. In the way that James gets hurt, which is he doesn't say anything to anyone and he just." She put her own plate down. "He gets more controlled. And I watch it happen, and then six months later he's fine, and we never discuss it."

"I'm not going to hurt him."

"Eric." She looked at him steadily. "You have a genetic assignment on Deck 2. It was selected before you were born. The thirty-year reproduction plan doesn't have exceptions for people having feelings in the lower decks."

The room went quiet in a particular way.

Eric said: "Everyone keeps talking about the assignment like I've forgotten about it. I haven't forgotten about it. I also know that—" He stopped. He picked up his plate and looked at it. "I know what it is. I know what it can't be. James knows too."

"Does he."

"Yes." He said it simply. "We've talked about it."

Jazmine absorbed this. Something moved in her face. She had not known they had talked about it. That was new information and she was adjusting to it.

Nathaniel thought: I should say something useful.

He thought: something bridging. Something that takes the genuine things both of them are saying and gets them to a shared frame.

He said: "The two of you are both trying to protect James, and the actual James would find this extremely irritating, which might be something worth—"

Jazmine looked at him.

He stopped.

Her eyes were amber-dark in the rest-cycle light of Deck 7. The warmth she usually turned on him was somewhere else. What was there instead was more direct, and it was reading him.

The echo arrived a half-second late: the problem-solving frame, the both-sides reframe, the tidy resolution that had nothing to do with what either of them was actually saying. He had already committed to it before he heard it.

He closed his mouth.

She looked at him for a moment and then looked back at Eric and said, quietly: "I'm not trying to take it from you. I just needed to say it."

Eric put his plate back on the table. His jaw moved slightly, not speaking, just the working of something that was going to come out differently than he expected.

He said: "I know." He said it with the extra weight of someone who has been holding something and is putting it down carefully. "I know you're protecting him. I know that's what this is."

The friction didn't leave the room. It shifted into something else: quieter, unresolved, the two of them in the same silence without knowing yet if it was shared ground.

Nathaniel sat with the cold compress on his shoulder and said nothing else. The cold pack had an opinion about his bruise and so did the room and neither of them required his input right now.

Anastasia said: "We should talk about whether this is still safe."

Not loud. From the corner, her back to the wall, her knees still drawn up: she spoke the way she placed everything, with precision, into the gap.

The room went quieter than it had been at any previous point. Not the friction-quiet of the argument. A different quiet.

She was not deflecting. He understood this. She had sat through the argument and waited and waited and now she had said the most operationally honest thing anyone had said in the room all night, and it had landed with a different weight because it was true.

The food sat on the table, still warm, mostly untouched.

Nathaniel thought about the checkpoint guard. The wrong denomination. The patrol rotation requested by someone who knew their route. Leila's ten-minute head start in an alcove that was not supposed to exist on any schematic.

He thought about the unanswered question.

He thought about the specific person in the room who had not been named in either version of the question and was sitting in the corner watching all of them, her face still and level, the way it was when she was waiting for something to become clear.

He did not look at Anastasia when he thought about this. He looked at the plate of food he had not touched and the cold compress he was still holding against his shoulder and the warm yellow light of Deck 7's rest cycle.

Jazmine looked at Eric. Eric looked at the floor.

Nobody answered Anastasia's question.

The room held the silence. All four of them inside it, in the warm close air of Jazmine's quarters, the food going cold on the table. Nobody moved to leave.

Nobody answered.

Which was, itself, an answer.