Spite Date Zero

Lyla Metcalf was forty-two years old and she had been drinking bad coffee out of the same dented thermos lid for eleven years, and she figured that about summed up her career on the Mudlark. The station was a dented cylinder orbiting a dead moon, the coffee was rehydrated and tasted like somebody had already drunk it once, and the rec dome had exactly one fake tree, which she watered herself because nobody else bothered. She liked the place. What she did not like, what she had not liked for a full year now, was Lance Hazelwood.

Lance was the operations director, forty-four, and he had the kind of smile that made you want to check your pockets. A year back, when old Ranger Kessler retired, the senior slot had opened up. Lyla had eleven years on the roster. She had done three hull rescues and written half the station's emergency protocols. Sonja Farley had five years on the roster and a laugh that carried down two corridors. Lance gave her the senior ranger title anyway, and then he had the nerve to tell Lyla it was about "team dynamics." She had thought about that phrase every single day since. Team dynamics. Eleven years of shifts, and the man had picked the word dynamics.

So on a Tuesday morning in the mess, Lyla sat with her lid of coffee and watched Sonja across the room, laughing at something Dale Pac had said. Dale was twenty-nine, junior mechanic, a decent kid who mostly kept his head down, which meant he was Lance's protégé of course, because everything decent on this station eventually bent toward Lance Hazelwood. Sonja was thirty-eight and good at her job, which was the annoying part. If she'd been useless, Lyla could have hated her clean. Instead she had to hate her with a side of respect, and that was the worst kind.

Dale came past with his tray and paused at her table, because he was polite like that. "Ranger Metcalf. The loader bay door's sticking again, third time this week. You want me to file it?"

"File it with Lance," Lyla said, stirring coffee that didn't need stirring. "Tell him the door's been sticking since he took over maintenance scheduling. Might be a dynamics issue."

Dale smiled the way you smile at a senior colleague who is clearly having a day, and went off to file it himself, because he was sensible. Sonja glanced over from across the mess with that look she got, the one that said she'd heard, and Lyla lifted her lid of coffee in a small toast. Sonja raised hers back, and there was nothing friendly in it, and honestly Lyla respected that too. At least Sonja didn't pretend.

The thing was, Lyla had a life outside this grudge. Sort of. At twenty-two she'd had one night with a visiting trader whose name she'd never bothered to keep, and at thirty-nine she'd dated a salvage tech for six months before they'd both admitted it was more habit than anything. Since then, nothing. The station had a bar that smelled like rehydrated hops and a rec dome with the tree, and she'd convinced herself that was plenty. But a year of pure spite, she was starting to notice, was also a kind of relationship. It took up the same space in your head. It asked the same question every morning, which was what is he doing today and how much will it annoy me.

***

She ran into Lance in C corridor that afternoon, because of course she did. C corridor was the narrow one that ran past the air recycling banks, and there was no way to pass somebody without being about a meter from them, and Lance always stopped to talk in exactly that corridor, every time, like he knew.

"Metcalf." He was holding a tablet and doing his casual lean against the pipe housing. "Dale tells me you're routing door complaints at me now."

"They're your complaints. You're the director."

"You've got an attitude problem, you know that?" He said it lightly, which was his trick. Everything came out lightly with Lance, like none of it counted. "A whole year of it. Farley gets senior and you've spent twelve months walking around like the station owes you money."

"The station does owe me money. Eleven years of it."

"See, that's the tone." He tapped the tablet against his palm. "That tone is why I didn't give you the slot. Not the work. The work's fine. The tone."

Lyla put her coffee lid on the pipe housing next to him, which was as close to setting down a gauntlet as her life offered. "Say what you actually stopped me to say, Lance. You don't do corridor chats. You do ambushes."

He looked pleased, which she hated. "Fine. Here's a thought. You want to prove the tone isn't a problem? Prove you can follow direction. Any direction. I'll set you a rule, one rule, and if you stick to it for thirty days without quitting, without sulking out, I'll give you a month of my salary."

"A month of your salary." She did the math without meaning to. It was real money. It was also, more importantly, his money. "And if I don't make it?"

"Then you stop complaining about Farley. Permanently. You never bring up the senior decision again, at work or in the bar, ever, as long as we both draw air."

That was actually painful to consider, and he knew it. The complaint was her best furniture. She'd furnished her whole inner life with it. But a month of his salary, and worse, the look on his face right now, which said he thought she'd fold. He had bet on her folding. That was the part that made the decision for her, honestly. Not the money. The bet.

"Fine," she said. "I accept. What's the rule?"

And here is where she should have asked more questions, she would think about this later. She should have said what kind of rule, give me the rule first, in writing. Instead she stood in C corridor with the recyclers humming and said fine like a woman signing something without reading it, which, she would eventually realize, was exactly what she was doing.

Lance tucked the tablet under his arm and got that smile going again. "One sexual encounter per shift. Explicit, actual sex, not some technicality. Once per shift, every shift you work, for thirty days. No relationship talk with the other party afterward. Nobody stays over. No feelings, no strings, no exceptions."

The recyclers hummed. Lyla stood there and let the whole thing land, and it took a second, because it was such a stupid thing that her brain kept trying to hand it back. "You're joking."

"I never joke about bets. You know that."

"You're my boss."

"It's a personal bet. Off the books, nothing to do with your job or your file, and you can walk away from it any day you like and the only thing you lose is the bet. One per shift. Thirty days. You said you'd follow any direction."

She had said any direction. She had said it out loud, in this exact corridor, maybe four minutes ago, and she could already hear herself saying it in some future argument, so there was no walking it back. That was the trap, and she saw it clearly, and she walked into it anyway, because the alternative was Lance Hazelwood winning, and over her dead recycled body.

"Fine," she said again. "Thirty days. But I pick the partners, not you."

"Obviously. I'm not a monster." He straightened off the pipe housing. "Starts tomorrow. And Metcalf? No quitting in spite. That's the whole test."

"There's no chance of that," she said, and picked up her coffee lid, and walked off down C corridor with her spine straight, feeling like a winner, which lasted about the length of the corridor.

Because the math caught up with her in the lift. One per shift. She worked the day rotation, which meant a shift every single day, which meant every single day for a month, she had to find somebody. On a station with, she counted them in her head as the lift climbed, maybe forty adults on rotation, and a rec dome with one tree, and a bar with hops that had never once been fresh. Forty adults, several of them married to each other, one of them Sonja, one of them Dale, who was twenty-nine and called her ma'am.

The lift opened onto her deck and she stood there in the corridor, the corridor where the light was always slightly orange, and thought, well. She had accepted a bet against Lance Hazelwood, a man she had hated professionally and personally for a year, and the terms of the bet required her to be, every day, busier than she had been in the last decade. And the truly petty thing, the thing she noticed as she keyed her door, was that somewhere under the panic there was a small hot coal of something that wasn't panic at all. She had been angry for a year. Angry was fuel. Apparently it burned in more directions than one.

She put the coffee lid in the little sink and looked at herself in the wash cabinet mirror. Forty-two, Ranger Metcalf, third hull rescue, author of half the emergency protocols, and starting tomorrow, one per shift, no staying over, no talking about it.

"Alright," she told the mirror. "Alright, Hazelwood. Game on."

The first shift of the bet was the next morning, a Wednesday, and Lyla spent most of it doing ranger things very deliberately and loudly. She checked the loader bay door, which was sticking for the fourth time this week, and filed a report about it with the word AGAIN in the subject line. She walked the outer ring. She refilled the thermos lid she'd been drinking out of for eleven years and drank the bad coffee like a woman with nothing to prove, and the whole time some part of her brain was running a quiet background process, sorting through the station's forty adults like a deck of cards and discarding most of them.

She could have gone to Dale, probably. Dale would say ma'am, blush, and agree to anything, and then it would be weird on the roster forever. She could have gone to the bar and fished, but the bar smelled like rehydrated hops and desperation and she'd have to talk to someone for at least an hour first. And there was the other problem, the one she kept circling. If she picked some innocent bystander on day one, that was her telling Lance the whole thing was a chore. That she was just clearing the bar. Like filing paperwork.

She did not want to file paperwork. She wanted to win.

So it was almost funny, in the way her life was sometimes almost funny, when the obvious answer walked into her head around hour six and sat down and refused to leave. There was one person on the station who definitely wouldn't get weird about it, because he'd written the bet. One person with something to lose too. One person she already hated, which meant no risk of feelings, zero, the safest possible outcome, mathematically.

She told herself all of that while she stood outside his quarters at the end of shift with her fist raised to the panel, and then she knocked before the coward part of her could vote.

Lance opened the door looking as if he'd been expecting the knock for six hours and had rehearsed not looking it. His quarters were exactly as cramped as everyone said, a bunk, a desk, a shelf of what looked like operational manuals nobody had asked him to keep. He'd cleared the desk. That was the detail she noticed. He'd actually cleared the desk.

"Well," he said.

"Shut up," she said. "You don't get to enjoy this."

"I haven't said anything."

"Your face said something. Your whole head said something." She stepped past him into the room, because hesitating in the doorway would have been worse than anything else available. The door slid shut behind her and the little room went very quiet. "Rules. Nobody stays. No talking after. We do this once and we're both professionals tomorrow."

"That's already the bet," he said. "You're just restating the bet at me."

"I'm restating it so there's a record. You like records."

He put his hands in his pockets, and for a second, one stupid second, he looked almost nervous, and that did more for her nerves than anything she could have said to herself. Good. He should be nervous. She'd spent a year being the one off balance in rooms with him.

"So how do you want to do this," he said. "Efficiently, I'm guessing."

"Efficiently. Angry. Quickly." She pulled her jacket off and tossed it on his bunk, claiming territory, and looked at him standing there in his operations director shirt with his collar half undone like always. "Ask me properly first, Hazelwood. I'm not doing this on a technicality."

That surprised him. She could see it land. He straightened up and looked at her and, God help her, asked like he meant it. "Lyla. Do you want to?"

"Yeah," she said. "I want to. I'd want to about forty percent less if you weren't you. But you are, so."

And then it was happening, and it was, she would admit to the mirror later, much less clinical than she'd planned. He came off the wall and asked where she wanted his hands, actually asked, and she said everywhere, quit asking, and he laughed into her neck and she shoved him back onto the bunk just to wipe the laugh off his face. The bunk was too short for the both of them, of course, everything on the Mudlark was built for skinnier people and politer moods, and their knees knocked and his elbow hit the shelf and a manual fell on his head, and she laughed, which she had not planned on doing, and he laughed back, which was worse.

She got her boots off with the grim efficiency of someone who'd done three hull rescues, and his shirt came untucked and then just came off, and there he was, forty-four years old and still in decent shape the way directors are because they pace around worrying. She put her hand flat on his chest mostly to hold him down. He put his hand on her hip and she felt her whole body go, oh, fine, apparently.

"Tell me if you want to stop," he said, which was such a management thing to say that she pinched him.

They fucked the way they argued. Fast, competitive, nobody willing to be the first to show strain. He got her trousers down around one ankle and stayed there, his mouth on her, patient in a way that made her furious, and she came with her hand over her own mouth out of pure spite, refusing to give him the sound. She felt him grin against her thigh and decided she hated him double. Then he was up and inside her and the spite part got a lot harder to hold onto, because he wasn't careful with her and she didn't want him to be, and the bunk frame was banging the wall in a rhythm that she was going to hear in staff meetings for a month.

"Harder," she said, because it was true and also because he'd want her to be quieter about it.

"Yes ma'am," he said, and she almost bit him, and instead she pulled him down and kissed