Chapter 6 - Leila

She walked in like she lived there.

Not a performance. Not the deliberate entrance of someone who has decided to make a statement. Simply the unselfconscious movement of a person arriving somewhere they arrive, stepping past Jazmine without excuse, her eyes moving over the room the way eyes move when they are looking for what has changed rather than taking in the scenery. The sweep included both of them. It took approximately two seconds and registered about as much emotion as a sensor completing a diagnostic.

Platinum hair, cut in a line so precise it looked architectural. Pale gray eyes, steady and scanning. A scar through her right eyebrow, white and clean.

She walked to the shelf, picked up the bottle, and poured herself a measure.

Then she sat down on the edge of the storage crate nearest the door, crossed her ankles, and looked at them.

She did not introduce herself.

Nathaniel looked at the bottle in her hand. The bottle that had been sitting on Jazmine's shelf with the upper-deck distillery mark, the one Eric had been reading the label of when Jazmine said that's not yours. It was, apparently, hers.

He looked at Jazmine. Jazmine was leaning against the closed door with her arms loose at her sides, watching all of them with the warm, interested attention she had been watching them with since the hydroponics bay. She was not going to explain anything. This was becoming clear.

He looked back at the woman with the bottle.

She was looking at Eric first, which was unusual. People looked at Nathaniel first. He was taller, and he had a face that had been reliably landing on the correct side of first impressions since he was approximately sixteen, and he had learned to use the moment people looked at him before they looked at anyone else. She was looking at Eric, who was standing slightly behind Nathaniel's left shoulder with his shirt half-unbuttoned from the heat of the tunnels, his hair in its perpetual chaos, his expression in its working-default of careful. She took him in once. Then she moved her gaze to Nathaniel.

She looked at him the way you look at a ship system before you trust it with anything important: verifying, not admiring.

"Where did you come from," she said. Not hostile. Level. "And why."

"Environmental systems review," Nathaniel said. "Cross-deck atmospheric audit, routine —"

"That's the second time that story has been deployed today," she said. "It was bad the first time."

Jazmine made a small sound that was technically not a laugh.

"I came from Deck 2," Nathaniel said. He deployed the charming version, the self-deprecating upper-deck-boy-who-knows-how-this-looks construction that had gotten him out of approximately twenty-seven different social situations where charm was the only viable currency. "We came from Deck 2. The tunnel access from Corridor 7 has a code that hasn't been updated since before either of us was born, so technically we were invited by eleven years of administrative negligence. We're not here about anything official. We're not here about anything. We were bored and curious and —"

She let him finish. That was the thing: she gave him the full runway. She sat with her measure of spirits and waited for him to land, and when he landed she was quiet for exactly three seconds.

Then: "Where did you come from. And why."

He heard the difference. He had thought she was asking about logistics. She was not asking about logistics.

He felt Eric go still at his shoulder.

"My name is Nathaniel Rowan," he said. "Deck 2. Governance family."

Her expression did not change. Something moved behind her eyes, quick and contained, and then the surface was level again: the same mild, calibrated attention.

She knew the name. He watched her process knowing it and file the processing away before it reached her face, and he thought: she is very good at this. Better than most people he had met in governance rooms, and he had met a great many people in governance rooms who were paid to be good at exactly this.

She looked at Jazmine.

Something passed between them that was not a conversation but had the content of one. A three-second exchange conducted entirely in expressions that were too small and too specific to read from the outside, the shorthand of people who had been translating each other long enough that the translation had become compression. Jazmine's part of it was a small nod, barely perceptible. Leila's was a blink that lasted a fraction of a second too long.

Whatever they had just agreed to, they had agreed to it.

She looked back at both of them.

Eric had not said a single word since she walked in. He was still standing slightly behind Nathaniel's left shoulder, arms at his sides, watching her. Not performing watchfulness. Simply watching, with the same still attention he had given the tomato plant and the maintenance schematics and the cat. She noticed. Nathaniel watched her notice it, the slight fractional pause before she looked away from Eric, a microsecond that he clocked and could not entirely interpret.

She lifted the glass and drank, unhurriedly, and set it down on the edge of the crate beside her.

"Rowan," she said. The word was perfectly flat. Not warm, not cold, the register of someone choosing neutrality very carefully. "That's a governance name."

"It is," he said.

"That means your father is on the council. Or adjacent to it."

"Council," he said. "Not adjacent."

She nodded once: not agreement, acknowledgment of data received. She was somewhere else for a second, running something, the same background process Nathaniel did at governance events when someone's name told him more than their introduction had. He knew what that process looked like from the inside. Watching it from the outside was, he had to admit, slightly unnerving.

The room was very small. The three of them were in it plus Jazmine at the door plus the bottle and the plant and the heat that had followed all of them inside. His shirt was sticking to his back. Eric's hair was doing several things at once. They were flushed and disheveled and wearing the wrong clothes for the company they were keeping and the room was the size of his wardrobe and he had not wanted to be anywhere this much in years.

That was the honest accounting. He was doing the honest accounting now, standing in four square meters of someone else's life with the lavender compound entirely absent from the air, his nervous system running without management, his body reporting everything it encountered directly and without summary: the heat, the smell of the small space, two women looking at them in completely different ways. He was aware that he was keeping careful track of Eric's shoulder at his back, the warmth of Eric's proximity a reference point he kept touching without deciding to.

Leila looked at the two of them. Both. Together.

He had the distinct impression she was assessing them as a unit, and he had the equally distinct impression she had already decided something about the unit, and it was not the same decision she would have made about either of them separately. He did not know yet what to do with that impression.

She picked up her glass again and rolled it slightly between her palms.

"Fine," she said. "But they pay for drinks."

Jazmine's laugh arrived fully formed and entirely unrestrained, filling the small room, real in the way everything down here was real: the laugh of someone who thought something was actually funny rather than the performed response to something intended to be funny. It was the most unguarded sound Nathaniel had heard in months. Possibly longer.

He looked at Jazmine laughing. He looked at Leila, who was watching Jazmine with an expression that had gone private: the right eyebrow down, the skepticism briefly off the clock.

He looked at Eric.

Eric was already looking at him with an expression that said, very clearly: yes.

Whatever happened next, yes.