Chapter 5 - Her Apartment

She walked fast and did not look back to see if they were following.

They were following. Of course they were following. Nathaniel had been following her for thirty seconds and had already cataloged the braid work from behind, which was even more elaborate at the back, the colored wire ends threaded through with more precision than he had registered at first, and the coveralls, which were fitted but practical, and the way she moved through the residential corridor: not making room, not checking who was ahead, taking the center line without looking up. He had seen people move that way on the upper decks. It had looked like an assumption there. Here it was something else. The corridor actually was hers.

Eric's shoulder knocked against his.

He looked over. Eric was grinning the grin he had last deployed approximately three years ago when they had bypassed the curfew code to get into the upper-deck observation lounge at seventeen and watched the stellar field rotate in the dark and felt, briefly, like the universe was something they were inside rather than something that had been curated for them. That grin. Nathaniel had not seen it since then. He felt his own face doing the same thing and did not attempt to stop it.

He knocked his shoulder back.

They walked grinning at each other behind a woman who had told them not to talk yet, through a residential corridor that smelled of cooking and other people's soap and something mechanical and two competing humidity levels, and it was, factually, the best thing that had happened in months. Maybe longer. He was not going to examine that estimate too closely.

Jazmine had her comm out and was texting one-handed while she walked, without looking at them or breaking pace. The screen was visible in his peripheral vision for approximately two seconds: two words and a number. He caught the word "deck" and a number that was either a location code or a time. A contact name he couldn't read in the peripheral glimpse.

He assumed she was warning someone ahead. Some kind of checkpoint system for unauthorized visitors, maybe, or a lookout they would need to clear before she let them go further. He had not been caught yet and was not going to be caught. Mental note: be charming at whoever they were going to meet next.

She stopped at a door. Pressed her palm to the lock without looking up from the comm and pushed it open with her shoulder.

"In," she said.

They went in.

---

The quarters were smaller than Nathaniel's wardrobe.

He knew this was a stupid comparison before he finished making it, but it was the one his brain offered him, mapping the square footage automatically, the way his spatial memory mapped anything. The sleeping shelf folded out from one wall; currently it was up, and in the space it would have occupied there was instead a small burner unit and two storage crates that were also apparently furniture. Personal things filled the corners: a tool bag, neatly folded items of clothing, a collection of components that were either spare parts or a project in progress or both. A shelf above the sleeping unit held: a small plant in a container that was not a standard hydroponics container, a framed printed image he couldn't make out at this angle, a bottle the specific amber color of upper-deck spirits, and something else he didn't have a name for yet.

Nothing was decorative. Every surface held something that was there because it was needed. Even the image in the frame, he suspected, was functional in some way he didn't understand yet. The plant sat under a light strip on purpose. The tool bag was positioned for quick access. Someone had thought about all of it.

It was tiny and it was completely real. There was no mechanism calibrating the air. The temperature was whatever the corridor temperature was, plus the residual heat of recent occupation, plus two additional bodies running warm from tunnel exertion. He could smell her space: someone's soap, someone's working environment, something dried and herbal on the burner unit.

He looked around openly. Incredibly curious, in fact: he had been since the hatch opened and the smell hit him and he had understood, viscerally, that the ship was not what he had been living in.

Eric had found the bottle.

He was standing at the shelf reading the label with the expression of a man performing casual interest at a crime scene. The bottle was the kind that didn't have labels in lower-deck commerce, but it did have a marking system: a specific heat-pressed symbol on the glass that Nathaniel recognized as an upper-deck distillery notation. Which meant the bottle had come from above. Which meant it was either trade or contraband, and either way, it told a story that he was going to want to hear.

"That's not yours," Jazmine said.

"I know," Eric said. He set it back with no change of expression. "I was just reading the mark."

"And?"

"It's Deck 4 origin. Old batch." He didn't elaborate. She looked at him for a half-second with an expression Nathaniel couldn't entirely read from this angle. Reassessment, maybe. Interest. Then she went back to her comm.

She had closed the door behind them. The three of them were in a room that was, generously, three meters by four, and she was still texting with one thumb while she stood by the door.

Nathaniel and Eric were standing in the middle of the space because there was no particular alternative, still in their upper-deck clothes, still warm from the tunnels, still running on whatever the tunnels had done to their nervous systems. He could feel his own heartbeat in a way he rarely could in the upper decks, which kept the heart calm as a side effect of keeping everything calm. Down here his heart was doing exactly what it wanted, which was run fast and warm and interested.

The rest of him was also running interested. He was not going to look down to confirm the specific nature of this interest. He was going to look at Jazmine's face instead, which was its own interesting thing: the small constellation of freckles across her nose, deeper than they'd looked from twelve meters away in the hydroponics bay, the amber eyes doing the assessment again, patient and slightly amused. She looked at him for a moment. Then at Eric. Then back.

Her smile started slowly. Not careful; it reached the freckles first and then the amber eyes, and he watched it arrive and his chest went warm in a way that had nothing to do with the tunnels.

They were both grinning back at her like idiots. He was aware of this. He could see it happening and chose not to intervene.

She was still texting.

"You're going to tell me," she said, looking at the comm screen, "that you're here on official business of some kind. Systems audit."

"I was going to say that," he said.

"You already said it in the hydroponics bay. It wasn't good then." She scrolled something, tapped twice. "It's a better story if you lose the governance department reference. Whatever you were going to name. Anyone who actually works in that department talks about the numbers, not the function."

He had been about to name his father's adjacent sub-committee. He closed his mouth.

"Good," she said. She pocketed the comm. She looked at them both with the unhurried attention of someone working on their own timeline. The room was extremely small. She occupied the space between them and the door with the easy authority of someone who owned it. "You came through the C-spine maintenance access."

"The junction hatch in Corridor 7," Eric said.

"That one's been accessible for eleven years," she said. "I was wondering when someone would notice."

Nathaniel absorbed this. There were several implications in that sentence, arranged in a stack that he was going to look at later when there was time to look at anything that wasn't her face. He filed them. "You knew about it."

She smiled again, small this time, private. "I know about a lot of things." Then she looked at them both again, the considering look, the calculation finishing itself: "You're going to want to come back."

This was not a question.

"Yes," Eric said, before Nathaniel could arrange his response.

"I thought so." She reached for the comm again, read something, her face going through something quick: the decision had been made somewhere back in the hydroponics bay and this was just the confirmation arriving. Her thumb was already moving.

Two knocks landed on the door behind her.

The sound was precise, not a casual knock. Two beats with a specific interval between them: a code.

She looked at both of them. She was still smiling. The smile now contained something additional, a layer that Nathaniel's social read was working hard on and had not yet placed.

She opened the door.