Colony 7 Estate

Glenna Swenson had better things to do with a day off than fight strangers over furniture. She was thirty-four, she worked nights at the pharmacy, and sleep was a thing other people did. But the sale flyer had said botanical specimens, and she had a weakness for botanical specimens.

So here she was. New Meridian's 150th anniversary week. The whole town had turned out for the estate sale at the old governor's residence.

The crowd was thick in the main hall. Benji Clifton stood on a stepstool near the stairs, hollering prices into a handheld megaphone that mostly made them worse. A woman in a sunhat was bidding on a rocking chair nobody needed. Two kids, probably older than they looked, were poking at the dead elevator like it might wake up.

Glenna squeezed past a table of tarnished silverware. She'd been in the building maybe ten minutes and already regretted it. The governor's residence was three floors of junk. Furniture. Dishes. A whole shelf of commemorative plates from anniversary parties nobody alive remembered.

The botanical stuff was supposedly in the back study. She headed that way, past the elevator with its yellowed OUT OF ORDER sign, past a lamp with a cracked base, into a hallway clogged with antiques.

And there he was.

Rene Raymond. Standing at a card table near the window, turning over a rusted hydrometer like it was the most interesting thing on Colony 7.

Glenna stopped walking. That was stupid, but she did it anyway.

Five years since she'd seen him. Five years, and he still stood the same way, shoulders a little forward, like he was always about to check the weather. He'd filled out some. The mining job off-world, she'd heard. Three years now. Everyone on this rock heard everything.

He looked up. Saw her. His hand stopped mid-turn on the hydrometer.

"Glenna."

"Rene." She kept her voice flat, which took effort. "That thing's rusted through. Probably doesn't measure anything anymore."

"That's sort of the appeal." He set it down anyway. "I wasn't sure you'd be here."

"I wasn't sure either." She glanced at the table. Old beakers. A brass scale. A crate of dried seed packets, labels faded to nothing. "They said there'd be specimens. I collect them. Well, you knew that."

"Did I?" He smiled a little. "It's been a while."

"Five years."

"That long." He rubbed his thumb along the table edge. "Feels shorter."

It didn't feel shorter. It felt like five years to her. She didn't say that.

"So. Mining," she said. "Still doing that?"

"Still doing that. Came back for the anniversary. Everybody comes back for the anniversary, apparently." He gestured at the hallway, the clutter, the dust. "Benji's selling a dead man's entire life at twenty credits a box."

"Business is booming, then."

"Look at this crowd. Benji's going to retire rich." He picked up one of the seed packets, squinted at it, set it back. "You working nights still?"

"Always. Somebody has to." She shifted her weight. "Corey covers days. He's twenty-seven and thinks the fireworks are going to be life-changing."

"Are they?"

"Fireworks are fireworks." She shrugged. "I've seen one sky explosion, you've seen them all."

"That's a grim take on the town's big week."

"I'm a night-shift pharmacist. Grim is the job description."

He laughed. Same laugh. She hated that she noticed.

A pair of women came down the hallway behind them, chattering about a cedar chest, and Glenna had to press against the wall to let them by. The wall had a mirror on it, half-covered by a doily of some kind. She caught her own reflection and decided not to look at it. Rene was polite enough to pretend he hadn't looked at her either.

The women passed. The hallway went quiet again.

"You look good," Rene said. Then, fast, like he regretted it, "I mean. Healthy. Night shifts agree with you."

"Night shifts do not agree with me. Nobody's night shifts agree with them." But she felt her mouth doing something she didn't authorize. "You look healthy too. Mines agree with you, I guess."

"They agree fine. Air's bad, food's worse, pay's good." He shrugged. "It's a job."

"Worth moving off-world for."

"Worth it then. I don't know about now." He paused. "I heard you got the corner unit. In our old building. The one with the actual window."

"I got the corner unit." She folded her arms. "Sofia across the hall told me you left your succulents with her when you moved. They're dead, by the way. All of them. I want you to know that."

"You killed my succulents?"

"I did not kill them. I didn't live there. They died of neglect, which is different." She pointed at him. "They were hardy varieties. It took real effort for them to die."

"That's very unfair."

"That's very true."

He was grinning now. She remembered that grin from a lot of contexts she wasn't going to think about in a hallway full of strangers and a dead man's dishes.

An old man came through carrying a framed portrait of some governor or other, and they both flattened against opposite walls to let him pass. When he was gone there was a card table between them and a question hanging in the air that neither of them touched.

"So what are you actually here for?" Rene asked. "Besides the seed packets."

"Specimens. Like I said." She picked up one of the faded packets, turned it over. Handwritten on the back, barely legible: *collected east ridge, year 92*. "Some of this stuff is older than me. Old colony cultivars. If any of it's still viable, it's worth real money to collectors. Or to me. I grow them."

"You still have that greenhouse in the yard?"

"You remember my greenhouse."

"I remember a lot of things about that yard."

She looked at him. He looked back, entirely too calm about what he'd just said. Somewhere behind them Benji's megaphone crackled out a number and the crowd murmured.

"Well," Glenna said. "The study's supposed to be back this way. If you're not busy pretending to shop."

"I'm not busy." He spread his hands. "Clearly."

They went down the hallway single file, because the furniture didn't leave room for anything else. A grandfather clock that didn't run. A hat rack holding four dead hats. The elevator, silent on their left, its doors half open like a mouth waiting for somebody to make a mistake.

Glenna glanced at it. "Does that thing still not work?"

"Hasn't worked since before you were born, probably." Rene knocked on the open door panel with a knuckle. Hollow sound. "Benji's selling it as a decorative feature."

"Decorative. That's one word for it."

The study door was at the end of the hall, propped open with a folding chair. Inside, someone had laid out shelves of glass jars, brass instruments, a stack of leather books gone soft at the corners. A hand-lettered sign said BOTANICALS AND SCIENTIFIC, PRICES AS MARKED.

"Jackpot," Glenna said, and meant it.

She went in. Rene stayed in the doorway a second, then came in too, and closed the door partway behind him out of habit, she supposed, because the hallway noise dropped and the room went quiet. Too quiet. She was aware of him across the whole small room, standing by the shelf of jars, while she pretended a stack of field journals was fascinating.

"There's a jar here labeled, and I quote, 'mystery liquid, do not open,'" Rene said.

"That's the governor's private reserve, probably."

"Should I bid on it?"

"Fifty credits for mystery liquid. Benji would love you."

"I'll think about it." He drifted closer to the shelf she was at. Not too close. Just closer. "This is a weird way to run into somebody."

"Is it? It's a town event. Everybody's here."

"It's weird because I looked for you at the fair last night. The whole night."

Glenna stopped turning journal pages.

"You didn't find me," she said, "because I was working."

"I know. Corey mentioned it. Nice guy. Talks a lot." He picked up a journal, put it down. "So this really was an accident, then. Running into you."

"Unless you followed me to the seed table."

"I didn't even see the seed table until you were standing at it."

"Then it's an accident." She closed the journal she'd been holding and finally turned to face him properly. "Accidents happen. Town's full of them this week."

"Sure." He was smiling again, small, like he knew something. "Accidents."

Behind them, out in the hall, somebody's elbow caught the folding chair and it clattered. The study door, propped open only partway, swung another inch. Glenna didn't notice. Rene did, and said nothing, and reached past her to pick up a jar of preserved moss instead, because his hands needed something to do.

The floor upstairs creaked. The crowd murmured on. The sale went on without them.

The jar was on the bottom shelf, back corner, half behind a cracked desiccator. Glenna crouched down to see it properly. Squat glass jar, wax-sealed, handwritten label gone brown at the edges. *Xenophyta 7. East ridge cut, year 88.* She stopped breathing for a second.

"No way," she said.

"What?"

"This. Do you know how rare this is? Xenophyta. They stopped cataloguing it after the blight years. Living sample, if it's still alive, which it might be, spores are stubborn." She held it up to the window light. Something greenish sat at the bottom, fuzzy, patient. "Price as marked," she said, reading the tag. "Twelve credits. Twelve. People would pay two hundred for this."

"So buy it."

"That's the problem. I don't want to buy it at the table. Benji sees me carrying it out, he reprices everything botanical on the spot. He knows I collect. Everyone knows I collect."

Rene crouched down next to her. Up close he smelled like the inside of a shuttle, that recycled-air smell nobody ever quite sheds. (Or maybe that was just her memory adding set dressing.)

"So sneak it out," he said.

"In what? My pocket? It's a jar, Rene. It clinks."

"Jacket. Inside pocket. It's a small jar."

She looked at him. He looked entirely too pleased with himself.

"You've done crime before?"

"Mining camps. You learn."

"Fine. Yes. Help me."

She took off her jacket, wrapped the jar in a spare cloth from her bag, tucked it in the inside pocket. It sat there like a small green heart.

"Okay," she said. "Now walk casual."

They went out into the hallway. The folding chair had moved. The study door hung open, swinging a little on its hinges, and neither of them thought anything of it. Down the hall Benji was up on his stepstool, megaphone in hand, selling a dresser to nobody in particular. The woman in the sunhat had moved on from rocking chairs to a washstand. The two kids were still orbiting the dead elevator, poking at it.

"Hey," one of them said. "The light's on."

"Elevators don't have lights," the other said.

"This one does. Look."

Glenna looked. The kid was right. There was a dim yellow glow inside the car, the first she'd ever seen from it. The backup generator, probably. Anniversary week, Benji running power to everything, even the joke elevator. "Huh," she said. The kids ran off toward the smell of fry bread. The elevator stood there, doors half open, lit up like it was a bad idea.

"Benji's auctioning the hallway mirror next," Rene said, reading a card. "We could put in a bid. Really commit to the bit."

"I have twelve credits and a stolen jar. I'm not committing to anything."

"You have a stolen jar. I have an alibi. We're a team."

She snorted. Then, because the hallway was crowded and slow and she didn't want to walk past Benji's stool just yet, she said, "We could take the elevator. One floor. Just to say we did."

"It's out of order."

"The light's on. The light being on is basically a legal document."

He raised an eyebrow at her. She raised one back. They got in. The car was small, wood-paneled, smelled like dust and old varnish, and the doors slid shut behind them with a groan. Rene hit the button for the second floor. Nothing happened. He hit it again. The car shuddered, lurched upward maybe half a foot, and settled. The light flickered.

"There it goes," Glenna said.

"There what goes?"

"My afternoon," she said. Outside, the generator coughed. Somewhere Benji was talking about power conservation and the fireworks budget. The yellow light died. The elevator dropped back onto its stop with a clunk and went dark and still, and the button glowed uselessly under Rene's thumb, and the doors did not open