The Last Bid

Harley had been on Mira for two years now. Two years and a month, if she was being exact, and she had stopped counting the days somewhere around month four.

Vantage was small. Small town, big sky, one street that counted as downtown. The market square sat right in the middle of it, and her pawn shop sat right in the middle of the square, with a faded sign that said HARLEY'S and nothing else. She'd meant to paint something more. Maybe a full name. Maybe a clever slogan. She never got around to it.

She was thirty-four, and this was the freshest start she'd ever managed. Back on the home worlds she'd been a different person with a different name and a long list of things she'd rather not think about. On Mira she was just the auction lady. That suited her fine.

Every Thursday she ran the weekly auction. Small stuff mostly. Tools, salvaged com units, somebody's dead uncle's fishing gear. Once a month something odd came through the door, and that was when the whole square showed up. Vantage loved an oddity the way other towns loved a brawl.

This month's oddity was sitting on her counter right now. A vintage tape recorder. Real magnetic tape, real reels, real buttons that went clunk when you pressed them. Some settler family had brought it across four systems in a padded crate and then let it go for grocery money, which was sad and also very normal.

She picked it up and turned the little crank on the side. The reels turned. The belt still had tension in it. She'd tested it twice with a cassette she'd found in a box of junk, and the thing had actually played. Warbly and warm, like a voice coming up from underwater.

"This'll fetch a price," she said to the recorder.

The recorder said nothing, being a recorder.

Outside, the sun was doing its slow afternoon slide toward the ridge. Tuesdays were her sorting days, with the auction still two days off, and her storage room in the back was currently a crime scene. Two years of donated junk, and she hadn't sorted a single shelf since the spring.

The bell over the door jangled.

Grady came in the way he always did, like the door had personally invited him. Twenty-nine, flight instructor at the spaceport, built like someone who spent his days hauling students out of simulators by their collars. He had a paper bag under one arm and a grin already loaded.

"Snacks," he said, holding up the bag. "And my two strong hands. Where do you want them."

"The hands go on boxes. The snacks go on the counter where I can see them."

"Fair." He set the bag down. It was those fried dough twists from the stall two doors over. She had a weakness. He knew it. That was the trouble with small towns. Everybody knew your weaknesses and weaponized them by week six.

Two years and a month ago, when Harley was a fresh arrival with a new name and a bad attitude about it, a friend of Grady's had died while holding his grandfather's pocket watch, lent out for a repair, and the watch had gone missing somewhere in the probate shuffle. Grady had spent a month being politely stonewalled by the estate lawyer.

Harley had found the watch in a crate of unlisted effects. She'd tracked him down at the spaceport and handed it over, no fee, no fuss. It had been his grandfather's. He'd cried a little, right there on the tarmac, and then pretended he hadn't.

"You don't owe me," she told him, same as she told him every time he showed up with his sleeves already rolled. "I've told you that about forty times."

"Forty-one now!" He was already heading for the back. "And I'm not repaying a debt, I'm helping a friend stack boxes. Completely different thing. Legally distinct."

She followed him back. The storage room was nine feet by twelve and had achieved a kind of geological stratification. Boxes from her first year on the bottom, boxes from last month on top, and a mysterious layer of extension cords in the middle that neither of them could explain.

"Wow," Grady said. "It's worse."

"It's not worse."

"There's a crate buried in the wall. The wall grew around it."

"That's load distribution," she said, and he laughed, and she let herself enjoy it. This was the thing about Grady. He was easy. He showed up, he worked, he laughed at her bad jokes, and he never once asked about her past, which in her experience was the most valuable trait a person could have.

They worked. He hauled, she sorted. Keep pile, sell pile, mystery pile. The mystery pile grew fastest, as always.

"So what's the big item this week?" he asked, dropping a box of old power couplers on the sell pile. "Heard old Tam ran his mouth at the diner about something with reels."

"Word travels fast."

"Tam travels faster. He was there before the crates were even off the ship."

She told him about the recorder. He whistled, appropriately impressed, asked if it still worked, and made her go demonstrate it while he leaned on the doorframe watching like it was a show. She pressed play on the test cassette and some long-dead settler's nephew warbled out a birthday song, and Grady clapped like it was a concert.

"There," he said. "That's your auction headline. 'Hear the dead sing.' Tam will spread it all over the settlement by tomorrow breakfast."

"You're terrible."

"I'm effective."

By the time the light through the little back window had gone orange, the room looked almost like a room again. Three tidy aisles. Labeled boxes. The mystery pile reduced to a single sad box of unmatched left gloves.

"Where do all the right gloves go," Grady said, staring into it. "This is the colony's great unsolved mystery."

"Spaceport washers," Harley said. "I have a theory."

"You have a theory about everything."

"It's a character flaw."

They sat on the keep-pile crates and split the last of the dough twists. She dusted sugar off her fingers and thought about the thing she'd been putting off saying all afternoon.

"Okay, so, small favor," she said.

"Is this a favor to balance the ledger? Because I thought we were done counting."

"Nothing to do with the ledger. Shut up. It's a logistics thing." She wiped her hands on her thighs. "You know the community theater group?"

"The one that puts on a play every year in that barn that should be condemned?"

"The barn is fine. I'm helping with this year's production. Doing their prop sourcing. Mostly from my sell pile, which is why it's convenient." She paused. "There's a dress rehearsal Friday night. Out at the Dovrin place, past the north fields. It's a long drive and I don't have a vehicle, and the transit cart stops running at six."

Grady nodded slowly. "You want a ride."

"I want a ride."

"I have a skimmer."

"I know you have a skimmer. Everyone knows you have a skimmer. You talk about it like it's a child."

"It's a good skimmer." He was grinning again, that easy lopsided grin. "Friday, huh? What time?"

"Rehearsal starts at seven. I'd want to be there by six thirty to sort props before people arrive."

"I can have you there by six twenty." He counted on his fingers, or pretended to. "Flight time from the square, what, twelve minutes? Fifteen with the turn over the ridge?"

"You'd fly me?"

"Harley." He looked almost offended. "I fly people for a living. I fly students who once flew the skimmer into a fence. Flying you will be a vacation."

"Six twenty," she said. "And if you're late I'm taking the cart and walking the last two kilometers in the dark."

"I'm never late."

"You were late to your own birthday thing at the diner. Everyone said so."

"That was weather."

"It was a light drizzle."

"Weather," he said firmly, and she laughed and threw a left glove at him.

He caught it. Of course he caught it. He was annoyingly good at everything, flying, catching, carrying boxes, being easy to be around. She'd noticed that last part before. More than once, actually. She'd noticed it and then filed it somewhere careful, because she was new here, and fresh starts had rules, and one of her rules was do not complicate the first actual friend you make in a new town.

But sitting on the crates in the orange light, watching him try to match a left glove with nothing, she thought maybe the rules could bend a little. Someday. Not today.

"So what's the play?" he asked, lobbing the glove back.

"Something old. The director found it in a settler archive. A romance, I think, with a famine in the second act."

"A famine romance. Bold."

"There's a death in act three, so I'm told. I've been sourcing lanterns and a fake goose."

"Fake goose."

"It dies. Don't ask me how. I gave them a taxidermy one and they said it wasn't emotional enough."

Grady nodded gravely, like this was a serious problem facing the colony. "The emotional goose crisis of Vantage. Tam will be all over it."

"Stop talking about Tam!"

"He's the news out here. You know that."

"I know that and it depresses me." She stood, stretched, felt her spine pop in three places. Boxes were hard on a body. "Six twenty Friday. Don't be weather."

He laughed all the way out the door, bell jangling behind him, and she stood in the empty shop with the sugar still on her fingers and thought, huh. Friday. A skimmer ride over the ridge at sunset with the easiest man on Mira.

That was going to be either fine or a problem. She genuinely could not tell which.

Friday came fast, the way Fridays do when you're dreading or looking forward to something and can't decide which.

Harley spent the morning at the shop sorting props into a crate. Lanterns. The fake goose. A bundle of silk flowers for the famine act, because nothing says famine like flowers, apparently, but the director had insisted. Six cases of them.

The goose was the problem. It was a big fabric thing with a wire neck, and every time she moved it the neck bent into a new insult. She'd propped it upright with a stick. It looked like it was judging her.

At five fifteen the bell jangled and Grady leaned in, flight jacket, hair doing whatever it wanted.

"Ready?"

"I'm ready at six. Why are you early?"

"Because I'm never late and I like a margin."

"You're a margin man."

"I'm a margin man." He picked up the goose crate, looked at the neck, and wisely said nothing.

The flight was exactly what she'd feared. Fine. Worse than fine. The ridge turn put the whole north valley in gold light, fields going amber, the Dovrin place a scatter of roofs with one big barn. Grady flew one-handed and narrated the whole way like he was a tour guide.

"And on your left, mostly dirt. On your right, also dirt."

"You're a professional."

"Best instructor they've got."

He set the skimmer down soft as anything at six eighteen. Two minutes early. He made sure she noticed.

The barn was big and drafty and full of folding chairs and people who all talked at once. The director, a wiry sixty-something woman named Petra Dovrin who owned the barn herself, was already yelling gently at everyone. Harley set up props on a trestle table. Lanterns lined up. Goose standing, barely.

Grady, having nothing to do, sat in the back row with the crew kids and watched like it was a real show. He laughed at all the wrong parts. He clapped when nobody had finished anything.

By seven thirty the rehearsal was limping through act two. The famine. Actors clutching at imaginary bread. It was, Harley had to admit, kind of gripping, in a rough way.

Then the lantern on the trestle table did something lanterns should not do.

It had been sitting there minding its business. Then it hissed. Then the fuel line, some cracked old seal she'd missed when she checked it, or maybe hadn't checked it, let go, and a fat orange flame ran up the side of the table like it had somewhere to be.

The goose was directly in the splash zone.

"Fire," someone said, conversationally, like naming a bird.

Then everyone screamed at once.

Harley grabbed the table edge and shoved the whole thing away from the silk flowers, which was instinct and also definitely wrong, because the table went over and the flame went with it and now the floor had fire on it. Great. Terrific. Sourcing failure of the year.

And then Grady was past her. No hesitation. He had a canvas drop cloth off a paint crate and he threw it over the burning table and stamped it down, hard, twice, three times, boot heels landing like he meant each one. The flame shrank, guttered, went out. Smoke everywhere. Acrid and thick.

"Out," he said, calm as a weather report. "Everybody out, single file, there's a door on the north wall, go."

And they went. Because apparently when a flight instructor says out, you go out. Harley herded the last two actors, one of whom was still holding her prop bread. Outside, in the cold dark, the whole cast stood in a shivering clump while smoke rolled out the barn doors behind them.

"Is the goose," Petra said finally, "dead?"

Harley looked. The goose was a sad wet charred thing with a bent neck. It had, in fairness, died dramatically.

"Really dead," Harley said. "Emotionally and literally."

"Good," Petra said. "That's the most emotion it's shown all month. We'll write it in."

Nobody was hurt. That was the headline. A scorched floor, a dead goose, one ruined table, and a barn that absolutely could not be used again tonight. Petra called it with a groan and a wave of her arms. Rehearsal over. Next week, weather and barn permitting.

Harley sat down hard on a fence rail and put her face in her hands.

"Hey!" Grady appeared beside her. "Nobody died. One goose died. The goose was scheduled to die."

"I gave them a fire hazard. I sourced a fire. Into a barn. Full of people."

"You sourced a fire and I put it out. Team effort." He nudged her boot with his. "You shoved the table away from the flowers. Quick thinking. Wrong thinking, but quick."

"I panicked."

"You acted. There's a difference and I grade on it professionally."

She looked up at him. Smoke smell in his jacket. Soot on one boot. Grinning at her in the dark like none of it mattered, and maybe it didn't, and maybe that constituted the entire lesson and she was being slow about it.

"The transit cart," she said, "stops at six."

"Good thing," he said, "you flew in with a margin man."

There was one place still lit in the whole spread of buildings. The little café attached to the Dovrins' east shed, run by a cousin of the family, open late on rehearsal nights and looking surprised to have customers. Half the cast crammed in. Hot cider. Somebody's aunt showed up with a tray of pastries from somewhere, nobody asked where. It was that kind of town.

Grady found them a table by the window with two mugs of cider and a plate of pastries that were mostly sugar and luck.

"So," he said, wrapping both hands around his mug. "About tonight."

"About the fire."

"About the fire. I deserve a medal."

"A medal? I gave you a working fire to put out. You should be thanking me for the excitement."

"Harley." He turned the mug in his hands. Looked at it, then up. "Can I say a thing? It's been sitting on me for a while and tonight felt like a sign."