The Auctioneer and the Engineer

So here's how my night started, and I'll tell it straight because there's no point lying to you people.

My name is Geri, I'm twenty-three, and I'm the auctioneer on the Girdle. If you've never heard of the Girdle, it's a squat little station stuck in orbit around a gas giant nobody bothered to name, full of narrow corridors and a mess hall that smells like recycled coffee no matter what day it is. I've run the auction block here for a year and a half now. I'm good at it. I can move surplus parts, cargo claims, unclaimed lockers nobody came back for. I talk fast and I read rooms, and people like watching me do it.

The thing about being the one who sells everything is that nobody ever thinks about what it's like to be the thing on the block. Or at least nobody thought about it until Brett moved into the cabin one deck above mine.

Brett is twenty-four, station engineer, sandy hair he never cuts on schedule, forearms he wipes on his coveralls like some kind of advertisement. We've been seeing each other for about eight months now. He's steady. That was the word everybody used about him. Steady Brett, reliable Brett, the guy who fixes your air scrubber at three in the morning and never asks for anything interesting in return. He dated a comms officer his first year here, amicable split when she got transferred out, and before me he had what he calls "a boring record." I had a fling with a cargo runner when I was twenty-one that lasted about six weeks and ended when I realized she treated me like something she'd won at auction. I didn't love that. You'd think I'd have seen the irony coming.

Anyway. Muster Festival. Every year the traders come through in a big wave, the corridors fill up with deckhands spending their pay, and the whole station gets loud for about a week. I was working the festival block, which means long days on my feet calling lots, and by the fourth night I was wrung out and hungry and I walked into the mess hoping for noodles and quiet.

I got neither.

Brett was at the corner table with a woman I didn't know. Visitor, obviously, trader's colors on her jacket, some liner outfit I didn't recognize. And she was leaning in. I mean leaning in, elbow on the table, chin on her hand, laughing at whatever he was saying like he was the funniest man to ever bleed air on this rock.

I stood in the entrance with my tray and I felt this thing go off in my chest. Not a big thing. A small hot thing. Like a pilot light flaring.

Because here's the stupid part. Brett wasn't doing anything. He was eating noodles and telling some story with his hands, the way he does, and he was being friendly, which is just how he is with everybody. He's friendly with the air recyclers. But she had her hand on the table close to his, and she kept touching her own collarbone when she laughed, and I stood there counting the ways I could cross that mess and make a scene.

I didn't make a scene. I'm a professional. I got noodles and took the table by the port window where I could see the whole room, which is auctioneer habit, and I ate about half of it while watching the two of them out of the corner of my eye like an idiot.

And it wasn't really about her. That's what I figured out somewhere between the noodles and the second cup of coffee. It was about how he looked with her. New. She was meeting him for the first time, and you could see it working on her, the steady guy with the good forearms telling a story, and everything about him was still a question to her. With me he was an answer. I knew what he'd order, what his feet did when he slept, what he muttered at broken pumps. I knew all of it and I loved all of it, but some animal part of me watched that trader find him interesting and thought, that used to be me. That was me eight months ago and I want it back.

That's the ugly little truth. I sat there jealous of a stranger for getting to meet my own boyfriend.

He came over when she left, all easy grin, dropped into the seat across from me. "You working tomorrow or is the block dark?"

"Dark after six. Why?"

"Festival's got that surplus sale on the docking ring. Thought you'd want to heckle the other auctioneer."

I looked at him and I could feel the jealousy sitting in my teeth like a chip of something. And underneath it, something else. Something warmer and dumber.

"Brett," I said. "Do you remember the first night we talked?"

He blinked at me. "The block. You sold a lot of coolant filters and I bid wrong on purpose so you'd call on me."

"You bid wrong on purpose?"

"Twice. I had no use for coolant filters, Geri."

I laughed. Then I sat back and looked at him and decided to say the crazy thing, because I'd had a lot of coffee and zero sleep and the pilot light was still going.

"Okay. Weird proposal. Hear me out before you make a face."

He made the face early. "This is already going badly."

"The Muster Festival is still going for three more nights. The whole station is full of strangers meeting strangers. So, one evening. You and me. We play it like we've never met. Strangers meeting at Muster. Fresh names, fresh stories, none of our history."

He put his fork down. "Why?"

And I almost lied. I almost made it a joke. But I owed him better than that, so I said, "Because tonight I watched some trader discover you from scratch and I was jealous of her. Not of you. Of her. She got to find out who you are. I already know, and I forgot what that felt like, finding out."

He was quiet for a second. Not the bad kind of quiet. The kind where he's actually chewing on it.

"So we'd be pretending," he said slowly. "Pretending to be strangers. In a station full of actual strangers."

"Pretending to meet. Everything else is real. And we set the edges first, whatever we don't want touched, we say so before we start. I'm not trying to trick either of us into anything. I'm trying to get the door open again."

"You think the door's shut?"

"I think it's stuck," I said. "Stuck doors still open. You just have to remember which way they swing."

He looked at his noodles, then at me, and I watched him do the thing he does where he takes something apart in his head before he touches it. Engineer all the way down.

"Okay," he said. "Tomorrow night. But I have conditions."

"Name them."

"I get a different name. And I get to have a backstory. Something with a ship in it, since apparently I'm a coolant filter enthusiast now."

"You can be whoever you want," I said. "You just can't be an engineer. Too easy. You'd talk about pumps and I'd know you."

"You don't know my pumps," he said, and there was a little edge of a grin there. "Tomorrow night. If it's stupid, we stop and get noodles and never speak of it."

"If it's stupid we get noodles anyway," I said. "Noodles are happening regardless."

He went back on shift and I finished my coffee and stared out the port at the gas giant doing its slow orange churn. And I'll admit I felt lighter already, just from saying it out loud. The plan was thin and a little ridiculous and I couldn't wait.

* * *

The next day the block ran long because a cargo broker from the inner rings wouldn't stop bidding on a lot of used pressure suits and I had to milk him for every credit on the station. By the time I got clear it was past eight and the festival was in full roar, corridors loud with music from three different doorways, deckhands dressed up in their one good shirt, traders hawking trinkets off blankets in every alcove.

I changed twice. I'm not proud of that. Two changes of clothes for a night of pretending to be a stranger. I ended up in the gray dress I never wear because it's too nice for work, and I left my hair down, which I also never do.

Brett wasn't in his cabin. I hadn't expected him to be. The plan, such as it was, was that we'd meet somewhere neutral, the observation blister at the top of the station, the little glass bubble that looks down on the gas giant. Half the station's romances had started in that blister during some Muster or other. It seemed right for this.

I took the lift up with my heart doing more work than it should have for a game I invented myself. The blister was dim, just the planet's glow coming up through the glass, and he was already there, standing at the rail, and he'd done something to himself too. He'd shaved. Properly. He was wearing the dark shirt he saves for funerals and job interviews.

He heard the lift and turned around, and for one whole second he looked at me the way the trader had looked at him. New. Like a question.

Then he cleared his throat and stuck out his hand, and his voice was different too, a little lower, like he was trying a stranger on for size.

"Festival crowd too much for you down there?" he said. "I'm Byrd."

I took his hand. His palm was warm and I knew that hand better than my own and I still felt it land somewhere new.

"Janna," I said. "Tonight, anyway. Close enough."

He laughed at that, and it was his real laugh, which almost broke the game right there. But he recovered. "Janna. That's a good festival name. Sounds like someone who sells things."

"I do sell things, actually. Sort of. Let's say I'm a scheduler. I schedule things for other people. Shipments, mostly. It's as boring as it sounds."

"Scheduler," he said, nodding like it was the most interesting word he'd heard all week. "I'm a salvage assessor. I fly out to old wrecks and tell insurance companies what they're worth. Mostly I tell them they're worth nothing and they get mad at me."

"That sounds made up."

"Most of my job is made up. Numbers made up on a form. But the flying out part is real, and the wrecks are very real, and sometimes they groan when your ship lands on them, and that's when I go back to my ship and leave."

I laughed and he bought me a drink from the little dispenser in the blister's corner, some sweet festival thing neither of us would ever order normally, and we took it to the rail. Below us the gas giant was turning through its slow orange bands, and the storms on the far side were lit up like lamps.

"So a scheduler," he said. "What's the worst thing you ever scheduled?"

"A wedding. Two cargo crews, both halves of it. Three hundred guests who all hated each other. It ran nine hours."

"Nine hours?"

"The cake melted twice. I billed them extra for the second cake."

"That's not scheduling, that's warfare." He was grinning down into his drink, and I realized I hadn't seen him grin like that at me in weeks. Maybe months. The entire point of the night was that and it still caught me off guard.

"Your turn. Worst wreck."

"Passenger liner. Forty years dead, nobody claimed it. I get out there and there's still a plant growing in the hydro bay. Somebody's ivy, still alive off the condensation. Everything else in the dark and frozen and this one ivy just going."

"That's awful."

"That's the best thing I ever saw. I told the insurance company the wreck was haunted so they'd have to leave it alone."

"They believed you?"

"They wanted to believe me. Nobody wants to be the guy who cleared a haunted ship for salvage."

We talked like that for the better part of an hour. Lies, all of it, good lies, the kind you build for a person you want to impress, and the strange thing was how much of it turned out to be almost true. His salvage assessor had a ship, a slow one, and a reason to be alone a lot, and I could hear Brett underneath all of it, saying the things he doesn't usually say because there's no fiction between the words and his mouth. I did the same. My scheduler hated her job and loved the station and hadn't been chosen for anything in a long time. I don't know where that came from. It came from somewhere.

At some point a knot of deckhands came up from the festival and crowded the blister, loud and happy, and we shifted down the rail to get out of their way, and there wasn't much room, and his arm was against mine, and neither of us moved it.

"Can I say something strange?" he said, quieter now, under the deckhands' noise.

"Please!"

"You have the kind of face I'd remember. I feel like I'd remember meeting you. Are you sure we haven't met?"

"Not that I know of," I said. "But I'd like to think you'd remember too."

"Where are you based?"

"Here. The Girdle. It's not glamorous."

"It's home, though?"

"It's home," I said, and something in my chest went tight, because I heard myself say it and it was more honest than anything I'd planned. Eighteen months on this station, eight of them beside this man, and I'd never once said the word home out loud to him.

He set his drink down on the rail. Then he reached over, slow, where I could see it coming, and put two fingers on the inside of my wrist. Just that. Just resting there where the pulse is.

"Your heart's going fast," he said.

"It does that."

"Is it the festival, or is it me?"

"It's you," I said. "It's been you for a while, Byrd, whoever you are."

He didn't move his hand. The deckhands were singing something about a crane operator and a lock gate, one of the old Muster songs, and the planet turned, and his fingers sat on my wrist like they were