Reclamation Shift

My wrist-comp chimed the end of the shift right as I was finishing the last manifest line, and I sat there a second in the little office pod listening to the hum of the air handlers and feeling that flat nothing I'd been feeling at end of shift for about a year now. I was twenty-eight, five years on Borderlight, and I used to have feelings at the end of a shift, mostly tired ones and sometimes good ones, but for about a year now it was just the hum.

I logged out, grabbed my jacket off the hook, and walked the dark row between the stacks. The warehouse district at night is its own kind of quiet, since the dome light comes through the atmosphere at a permanent dusk and everything under it just sort of settles into a gray-blue half-sleep, the prefab walls and the hydroponic beds between them all giving off that faint green glow the grow-lamps make. My boots sounded loud on the deck plating. I could hear the irrigation cycling in the garden bay two doors down, that soft tick and rush it does every forty minutes, and I counted it the way you do when your head is empty and you don't feel like filling it.

That's when I saw Jasper's silhouette at the far end of the row, standing by the secondary door with his scanner raised, doing inventory checks on the overflow pallets probably, and something in my chest did a small uncomfortable move that I hadn't felt in a while. We used to be close, him and me, back when he moved in next door three years ago, back when Angelique dragged us both to that colony social and made us talk to each other like we were plants she was trying to cross-pollinate. We shared drinks in the courtyard, we talked about our jobs and our families back on Titan and Mars, and I remembered once thinking he had a nice laugh and then deliberately not thinking about it again. Somewhere along the way it had all gone polite and quiet, nods in the courtyard, small talk about the weather outside the dome which is always the same weather, and I didn't know whose fault that was. Maybe both of ours.

He turned when he heard my boots, and even from thirty meters I could see him recognize me, the way his shoulders shifted. "Jeanne," he said, kind of surprised. "Late one?"

"Manifests," I said, and held up my wrist-comp like that explained it. "What about you?"

"Overflow count. Maintenance flagged two pods with sensor drift and I'm the lucky one who gets to babysit the recount." He smiled a little, and it was the same smile I remembered, crooked on one side. "You want a hand walking out? Misery loves company."

"I'm gonna take that as you offering to walk me home, which is ridiculous, because we live next door to each other," I said, and he laughed, and there it was, the nice laugh.

We walked the row together, and it was strange how the silence between us used to be easy and now it had this thin film over it, like we were both being careful with our feet. He asked about my week and I said fine, I asked about his and he said busy, and that was basically the whole conversation until we got to the side corridor that cuts behind the maintenance bays, the shortcut we both knew.

The cargo pod did it. One of the tall storage pods sits half-recessed in the wall there, and as we passed it the thing made a sound like a held breath and then the seal door hissed down across the corridor entrance behind us, fast, and a second panel slid down at the other end. I heard the locks set with three deep clunks. The emergency strip overhead flickered twice and came on, a dull amber, and the pod itself went dark and quiet like it was embarrassed.

Jasper stood with his scanner still in his hand, looking at the sealed panel, and I stood looking at him looking at it, and then we both just stood there in the amber light not saying anything for a good while. The air handlers in the corridor had cut with the seal, so there was nothing to listen to except our own breathing and the faint tick of the pod cooling down.

"Well," he said finally. "That's new."

"Is it supposed to do that?"

"No, and that's kind of the problem!" He lifted his wrist-comp and frowned at it. "No signal. The pod shell is probably damping it. Standard containment shielding, in case someone seals live cargo." He knocked on the panel with a knuckle, twice, and knocked again. "Hello! Trapped inventory specialist, requesting assistance!"

Nothing answered him except the emergency light flickering once, and I laughed, and it came out more like relief than humor. "Great. So we just wait for maintenance to notice."

"Somebody does a corridor sweep at the top of every shift. Four hours, give or take." He turned around and leaned back against the pod wall, and the amber light did something kind to his face that the dome dusk never did. "Sorry. You're stuck in here with me of all people."

"Why of all people?"

"I figured you'd rather be stuck with literally anyone else, the way things have been." He said it lightly but not that lightly, and my throat did that uncomfortable move again.

"I don't mind," I said, and it came out too fast, so I said more of it. "I mean it. It's been weird between us and I don't even know why, and I've sort of missed you."

He was quiet a second, watching me in the amber light, and then he sat down on the deck with his back against the pod, and after a moment I sat down too, a meter away, because sitting felt better than standing there like two parcels waiting to be claimed.

"You remember the night we watched the aurora from the dome roof?" he asked the wall across from us, not me exactly, and my throat tightened up so fast I had to swallow before I could answer.

"I remember," I said.

"We were out there four hours. You had that terrible thermos coffee and you kept insisting it was fine." He was smiling at the wall. "You said the gas giant's shadow looked like it was eating the sky, and I said that was the most Jeanne thing anyone had ever said to me, and you told me to shut up and drink my coffee."

"It was fine," I said, and my voice wasn't quite steady. "The coffee."

"Yeah, it really wasn't." He laughed softly, and then the laugh went out of him and he just sat there with his hands loose in his lap, and the silence came back but it was a different silence, warmer and more dangerous. "I kept thinking about that night for months afterward. I kept thinking I should have said something that night and I never did, and then the window closed, and then it kept staying closed, and I don't even know how."

My hands were cold in my jacket sleeves and the pod ticked behind our backs, and somewhere above us the amber light buzzed faintly, and I thought about all the evenings I'd stood in my little unit listening to his door close and told myself it was better this way, quieter this way, safer this way.

"I closed it," I said, and it felt like handing him something breakable. "The window. I closed it myself after that engineer, after things went bad with him last year, and I just, I shut everything down, including you, and I'm sorry."

"Jeanne." He turned to look at me, and up close in the amber light his eyes had the gas-giant shine in them, that faint banded glow the dome lets through at dusk. "You don't have to apologize for taking care of yourself."

"I know. But I missed you the whole time and I never said so, and now we're sealed in a corridor by a malfunctioning cargo pod, which is honestly the most either of us has said to each other in a year."

That got a real laugh out of him, a big one, and it loosened something in my chest that had been set wrong for years.

The laugh faded and neither of us rushed to fill the space after it, which was its own kind of strange, because for a year our conversations had been all filler, weather reports about the dome, complaints about the hydroponic basil, and now there was all this room in the quiet and neither of us knew what to put in it. He shifted his shoulder against the pod wall and turned toward me a little more, and I turned too, crosswise, my knees coming up onto the cold deck because sitting still with my legs out in front of me felt too much like waiting for something.

"Can I ask you something?" he said, and his voice had dropped from the corridor-sweep joke voice to something lower, careful, the voice he used for inventory counts that were going to come out wrong.

"That's a question," I said, and he huffed a laugh through his nose but didn't let it derail him.

"When did it start? The weirdness. Because I've been going back over it and I can't find the moment. One month we were having dinner in your unit three times a week and the next month you were nodding at me in the corridor like I was a delivery drone."

I looked at my hands in my sleeves, at the amber light lying flat and orange across my knuckles, and I tried to find the moment too and couldn't, because it hadn't been a moment, it had been a slow leak, a year of smaller and smaller answers until there was nothing left to answer with. "I don't know," I said. "After the engineer thing I just stopped feeling anything, and I don't mean sad, I mean nothing, like the end of a shift used to feel like something and then it didn't, and I stopped wanting dinner and stopped wanting to talk, and somewhere in there talking to you started to feel like work, and I think that was me, not you. I think I was rationing myself."

He nodded slowly, the way he does when he's checking a manifest against what's actually on the shelf, and he didn't say anything for a while, and the pod ticked behind us, cooling metal, and the light buzzed.

"That matches," he said finally. "Because for a while there I kept making excuses to knock on your wall. Borrowing tools I already owned. I'd stand in the courtyard by the hydroponics for ten minutes working up to it."

"I knew about the tools," I said, and he looked at me, startled. "You asked to borrow my torque driver twice in one month. I own three torque drivers and you know I own three because you helped me carry them home."

He laughed and put his head back against the pod. "Okay, yes, that was maybe not my best cover work."

"It was terrible," I said, and it came out soft instead of sharp, which surprised both of us I think, because under all that politeness for a year there had been this other thing, this warmth with no place to go, and it was leaking out now in a sealed corridor with nowhere to hide.

Then he reached over and brushed a strand of hair off my cheek, the one that always falls loose no matter what I do with it, and his fingers touched my jaw on the way back and I didn't pull away, and the air in that little sealed space changed, I can't describe it better than that, it went from air to something with weight in it, warm and slow.

"Sorry," he said, but he didn't sound sorry, and his hand stayed where it was, resting against the side of my neck, not gripping, just there.

"Don't apologize," I said. "Please." And my voice did something on the please that made him move closer, a shuffle on the deck, and then his forehead was against mine and we were both breathing the same pocket of air, and I could feel how careful he was being, how much he was holding back, waiting for me, and something in me that had been shut for a whole year on this moon cracked open like a seal.

"I have to tell you something," I said, against his mouth almost, that close.

"Okay."