Текст книги "Finity's End "

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 23 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

But with a flash on that meeting in the bar, he didn’t trust JR, in the same way he didn’t trust anyone on the ship.

And the second after that door had closed… he knew that that wasn’t an accurate judgment even of his own feelings, let alone of the situation, and that he should have said something. It was increasingly too late. The thought of opening that door and chasing JR down in the corridors with other crew to witness didn’t appeal to him.

Not until he’d have to go a quarter of the way around the ship to do it; and by then it was hard to imagine catching JR, or being able to retrieve the moment and the chance he’d had.

It didn’t matter. If JR hated his guts and supported his move to get off the ship, it was all he wanted. Make a single post-pubescent friend on this ship, and he’d have complicated his life beyond any ability to cut ties and escape. That was the mathematics he’d learned in court decisions and lawyers’ offices, time after time after godforsaken time.

There was a sour taste in his mouth. He saw that meeting in the bar as a moment when things had almost worked and he’d almost found a place for himself he’d have never remotely have imagined he’d want… as much as he’d come to want it.

He couldn’t go home. But he couldn’t exist here, where clearly someone, and probably more than one of the juniors, had not only expressed their opinion of him, but had done it in spite of JR’s opposition—not damaging him , because the petty spite in this family no more got to him than all the other collapsed arrangements had done. The illusions he’d had shattered were all short-term, a minimum amount invested—so he only felt a fool.

What that act had shattered in JR was another question. He saw that now, and wished he’d said something. But he hadn’t done the deed. He hadn’t chosen it. He couldn’t fix it. His being here had drawn something from JR’s crew that maybe nothing else would have ever caused.

Now it had surfaced. It was JR’s job to deal with it as best he could. And he’d let the door shut on a relationship it would only hurt JR now to pursue. If he chased after it—he saw the damage he could do in the crew. He was outside the circle. Again.

He began to clean up the room, replacing things in drawers and lockers, Jeremy’s as well as his own. And he saw that JR was right. Jeremy was in a hell of a situation. Jeremy had latched on to him in lieu of Vince and Linda, with whom Jeremy had avowed nothing in common but age; and now when he left, Jeremy would have to patch that relationship up as a bad second choice.

Worse still, Jeremy had set some significance on his being the absent age-mate, Jeremy’s lifelong what-if, after Jeremy had, like him, like so many of this crew, lost mother, father, cousins… all of the relationships a kid should have.

The last thing the kid needed was a public slap in the face like his moving out of the cabin they shared, in advance of the time he made a general farewell to the ship.

Jeremy was the keenest regret he had. In attaching to him, the kid had done what he himself had done early in his life. The kid had just invested too much in another human being. And human beings had flaws, and didn’t keep their promises, and all too often they ducked out and went off about their own business, for very personal reasons, disregarding what it did to somebody else.

That was what it was to grow up. He’d always suspected that was the universal truth. Now, being the adult, he did it to somebody else for reasons he couldn’t do anything about. And maybe understood a bit more about his mother, who’d done the chief and foremost of all duck-outs.

He went to the galley when he’d finished the clean-up.

“Did you find it?” was Jeremy’s very first question, and there was real pain in Jeremy’s eyes.

“No,” he said. “JR’s looking for it.”

“We didn’t do it,” Linda said, from a little farther away.

Vince came up beside her.

“We’d have done it,” Vince said, “but we wouldn’t have stolen anything.”

He’d never have thought he’d have seen honesty shining out of Vince. But he thought he did see it, in the kids whose time-stretched lives made them play like twelve-year-olds and look around at you in the next instant with eyes a decade older.

“I believe you,” he found himself saying, and thought then he’d completely surprised Vince.

But he saw those three faces looking to him—not at him, but to him—in a way he’d never planned to have happen to him or them. And he didn’t know what to do about it.

Bucklin was the first resort. Wayne was the second. Lyra the third. If one of those three would lie to him, JR thought, there was no hope of truth, and Bucklin said, first off:

“I can’t imagine it.”

Wayne simply shook his head and said, “Damn.” And then: “What in hell was he doing with a hisa artifact? Aren’t those things illegal?”

Lyra, when he found her in the corridor at B deck scrub, had the stinger. “Is it remotely possible Fletcher faked it?”

He supposed he hadn’t a devious enough mind even to have thought of that possibility.

Or something in Fletcher’s behavior had kept him from thinking so. He entertained the idea, turned it one way and another and looked at it from the underside. But he didn’t believe it.

He tracked down the junior-juniors, who were with Fletcher, working in the mess hall. “I want to talk to them,” he said to Fletcher, and took Jeremy to a far enough remove the waiting junior-juniors couldn’t see expressions, let alone overhear.

“What happened?” he asked Jeremy.

“We got back and it was just messed,” Jeremy said

He was tempted to ask Jeremy who he thought had done it. But a second thought informed him that the last thing he wanted to do was start an interactive witch hunt. “Any observations?”he asked

“No, sir,” Jeremy said.

“How’s Fletcher behaving?”

“He’s being real nice,” Jeremy said, and looked vastly upset. “You think maybe we should call back to Mariner, maybe, if somebody sold it?”

He had to weigh making that call, to inform Mariner police. He didn’t say so. He didn’t want to log it as a theft on station: it would taint Finity ’s name, no matter what spin he put on it: possession of a forbidden artifact, theft aboard the ship. It was excruciatingly embarrassing, at a time when Finity ’s good name had just secured agreements from other captains and from the station that were critical to peace, and at a time when—he was constantly conscious of it—the captains had life and death business under their hands.

At any given instant, the siren might sound and they might be in a scramble to stations regarding some maneuver by the ship in front of them.

Meanwhile all their just-completed agreements hung on Finity ’s unsullied reputation for fair, rigorously honest dealing. Taint Finity ’s good name with a sordid incident aboard and captains and station management back at Mariner had to ask themselves whether Finity was as reliable and selfless in her dealings as legend said of the ship. Finity had been meticulously honest. Other captains and the various stations had contributed to the military fund that kept Finity and Norway going without limit, repaired their damage, fueled them, armed them, trusted them—and he had to call station police and say there’d been a theft on a ship no one else could get aboard?

Silence about the matter was dishonest toward Fletcher. But telling the truth could damage the ship and the Alliance. There was no clean answer. And the matter was on his hands. He had to take the responsibility for it, not pass it upstairs to the senior captains; and that meant he had to answer to Fletcher for his silence, in his absolute conviction that, whatever else, if it had ever existed, it was aboard, because no member of this crew would have sold it ashore.

One last question, one out of Lyra’s question: “What did this artifact look like?”

“About this long.” Jeremy measured with his hands, as Fletcher had, exactly as Fletcher had. “Brown and white feathers, sort of greenish twisted cords… it’s carved all over.”

“You did see it?”

“He let me hold it. He let me touch it. They’re real feathers .”

“I’m sure they are.” Until Jeremy’s description he had no evidence but Fletcher’s word that such a stick actually existed, and he set markers in his mind, what was proved, what was assumed, and who had said it. The stick now went down as a fact, not just a report. “Did he say where he got it?”

“A hisa gave it to him. He said the cops got him through customs. He says the carvings mean something.”

So much for Wayne’s question whether it was legal. Fletcher claimed to have met Satin, who had authority; Fletcher had come off-world and through customs. Fletcher was entitled to have it, if Jeremy was right. He didn’t know what the black market was in such items, but it had to be toward fifty thousand credits.

And in any sane consideration, what did somebody in the Family want with fifty thousand credits, when Finity paid for everything that wasn’t pocket money on a liberty, and where, if someone truly wanted something expensive, the Family might vote it? There was nothing to buy with fifty thousand credits. There’d been no requests for funds made and denied to anyone. There was just no motive regarding money.

Fifty thousand might get Fletcher a passage back to Pell. That unworthy thought had flitted through his mind.

But Fletcher hadn’t missed board-call, hadn’t skipped down the row of berths to seek passage on some other ship bound back to Pell, and most significantly, Fletcher hadn’t even minutely derelicted his assigned duty to the juniors, and he knew far more minute to minute where Fletcher had been during the liberty than he could answer for anybody else in his command, including Bucklin.

And the juniors, as for their whereabouts, had been with Fletcher, the most conscientious, the most rigorous supervision the junior-juniors had ever had in their rambunctious lives.

He couldn’t say that about the senior-juniors, who’d been scattered all over the docks, running back to the ship on errands for senior command, a whole string of errands which had put them aboard in a ship mostly vacated, a ship in which, if you were aboard and past security, there was no watch on the corridors, beyond the constant presence in ops and the captains intermittently in their offices.

That senior crew would do something so stupid was just beyond belief. It was most assuredly his own junior crew that had done it—and it added up to an act not for money but aimed at Fletcher.

He sent Jeremy back and had Jeremy send Linda to him.

“Do you know anything about this?” he asked Linda, and Linda shook her head and returned her usually glum expression.

“No, sir. I don’t. They shouldn’t have done it, is what.”

“What, they?”

“The they that did it. Whoever did it.”

“No, they shouldn’t. Go back and send Vince.”

She went. Vince had stood at the threshold of the mess hall, looking this direction, and when Linda went back, he started forward, walking more slowly than the others, looking downcast.

“I didn’t do it,” Vince said before he even asked the question.

“You didn’t do it.”

“No, sir.”

“Look at me.”

Vince looked him in the eyes, but not without flinching.

“So what do you know that I ought to know?” he asked Vince.

“Nothing. I didn’t do it.”

“The pixies got in and did it, did they?”

“I don’t know who did it,” Vince said hotly. “I don’t do everything that goes wrong aboard this ship, all right?”

“Sir,” he reminded the kid.

“Sir,” Vince muttered. “I didn’t do it, sir .”

“I didn’t think it was likely,” he said, and Vince gave him a peculiarly troubled look.

In the same moment he saw Fletcher coming toward them. Fletcher came up and set a hand on Vince’s back.

“He’d have told me,” Fletcher said. “Sir.”

He shut up, prevented by the very object of his charity. He saw a cohesive unit in front of him. Linda had followed Fletcher halfway back and stood watching. Jeremy had come up even with her, both watching as Fletcher violated protocols to come to Vince’s defense. It was Vince on whom suspicion generally settled—in most anything to do with junior-juniors.

Which wasn’t just. And Fletcher had just made that point.

“I take your assessment,” he said to Fletcher. And to Vince: “Thank you, junior.”

“Yes, sir,” Vince said; and JR left, with a glance at Fletcher, who met his eyes without a qualm, in complete, unassailable command of their fractious junior-juniors—the tag-end, the motherless, grown-too-soon survivors of the last liberties Finity had enjoyed before these last two ports.

He didn’t know what exactly had happened in the last couple of weeks on Mariner, or what spell Fletcher had cast over the unruly juniormost, but he knew loyalty when he saw it. Fletcher said he was leaving. If he did leave—he’d do lifelong damage to those kids in the same measure he’d done good.

It was hard to conceive of the mental vacuum it would take even for a junior-junior to have done the deed. For one of his crew to lay hands on something that unique, that clearly, personally valuable—he almost thought it of Sue… and even Sue’s spur-of-the-moment notions fell short of the mark. Whoever had taken it had known, even if it were perfectly safe, even if it was meant as a joke, he had to assume some crueler intent far more like the charges Fletcher had leveled. Whoever had done it, above the age of children, had to know the minute they saw a wooden object that it was valuable, in fact irreplaceable, and that meddling with it went beyond any head-butting welcome-in rituals.

Start through his own circle in the same way, in a hierarchy of suspects? Vince had known, automatically, that he was the chief suspect, even when he knew that Vince hadn’t had an access that made it likely. Vince just assumed because everyone else assumed. And in a society composed only of family,—he felt damned sorry about the spot he’d just put Vince in, letting him sweat until the last.

Granted Vince had helped build that unfortunate position for himself over the years. Sue and Connor had built theirs in exactly the same way; but damned if, having done an injustice to Vince, he now wanted to charge in and put them publicly and automatically at the head of his list of suspects.

He asked himself what he did want to do as he walked the corridor back to the lift, and that list was unhappily short of resources.

The circuit took him past the laundry, which was in full operation, Connor receiving bundles at the half-door that was the counter, a half-dozen cousins in line to toss their laundry in.

“Get those six customers,” he said to Connor, at the counter, and waved the line on to do their business and clear out. “Then put the chute sign out and fold up.”

“What’s this?” Chad asked, as he and Sue turned up from inside.

Chad. Connor, Sue, the whole threesome.

“Shut down for a quarter hour,” he said. “Meeting in rec.”

“What about?” Sue asked.

“No questions. Just show up.” He went down to the nearest com-panel and used his collective code to page all the senior-juniors at once, immediate meeting, shut down and show.

Then he went to rec himself. Toby and Nike had been breaking down the boarding config in rec and restoring the area’s open space. They had rails in hand, and the inflexible rule was that those long rails and the stanchions went into storage one by one and immediately as they were dismounted, being the kind of objects that, end-on, could deliver small-point impact with a high-mass punch.

“Got your page,” Nike said. “What’s up?”

“Wait for all of us. Stow that rail and wait.”

“Trouble?” Toby asked, with what seemed genuine lack of information.

And, dammit, he was having to ask himself bitter questions and read nuances of expression, forming conclusions of guilt or innocence on people he’d have to rely on for his life. He’d known Nike when she was Berenice in the cradle. He’d known Toby when he was scared of the dark in his new solo cabin, alone for the first time in his life.

Bucklin arrived with Wayne. Chad and Connor and Sue came in. Dean, Lyra, and Ashley came in, and there they were, every member of the crew under thirty and over shipboard seventeen.

All that survived, except for four junior-juniors, the ship’s whole future.

“Something happened among us,” he said, standing, arms tucked, and made himself watch the faces. “Somebody seems to have played a joke on Fletcher, and he’s not real upset about the stuff in the lockers or the bedsheets, but he wasn’t prepared for it. If he’d been expecting something like that he might have gotten back to his quarters posthaste. He didn’t. As a consequence, he and Jeremy spent a couple of very bad hours under heavy accel with loose objects all around them while we have a hostile ship in front of us and a Union stranger running on our tail.”

Very serious faces. Fully cognizant of the danger. Fully cognizant of the fact they had trouble among themselves in ways no one had reckoned.

“Nobody got hurt,” he said. “It was their good luck we didn’t have an emergency. But there’s more to it than that. A keepsake disappeared, something personal that can’t be replaced. That’s why Fletcher’s upset. Now I’ve talked to the junior-juniors. And I’m going to suggest that if possibly—possibly—this was just extremely bad judgment, and somehow the object got misplaced—even damaged—it would be a good idea if it turned up in my quarters. Or Fletcher’s. I’m going to hope on my faith in this crew that this event will happen within the hour. I’m going to give this crew half an hour off-duty and I’m going to go back to the bridge in the hope that this will in fact happen and we can find a way to patch what’s happened. I’m not going to answer any questions. If one of you knows what I’m talking about and can solve the problem expeditiously I would be personally grateful. If one of you wants to talk about it, you can page me. If anyone has anything to add to the account, I’ll listen right now.”

There was absolute quiet. Bucklin and Lyra and Wayne looked at him. Sue looked to Connor, and Chad looked at her, and for a moment he thought someone was going to say something.

But heads shook in denial, Chad’s, Sue’s, and the ones who had looked to that silent exchange looked back at him.

No answers. There was still hope, however, of a miraculous appearance.

“That’s all, then,” he said, and left and went to the lift, rode it up to A deck in a mood that drew glances from senior crew he passed on his way to the bridge.

“How’s it going?” he asked when he took his seat at the console. Trent, next over, said, “No change.”

He wished he could say that about the junior crew.

Chapter 18

No missing artifact turned up in his cabin. JR went down to A deck, to his own quarters, hoping and fearing… and fears scored. Hope got nothing. The missing item wasn’t on his bed, not on the sink.

He began to get angry, and to ask himself who in his command would be afraid to come to him. Scared had to describe the perpetrator by now.

Except if someone from outside the ship had gotten past all their security… and in that case why target Fletcher’s room? The lifts all required a key when the ring was locked down, a key that had to be gotten from the duty officer, so the bridge couldn’t be reached. The operations center would be a target, but that had been manned around the clock, and nothing else was missing in the whole ship.

He began to entertain again the notion that Fletcher might be a very good actor, even that his exemplary behavior during the liberty was a set-up. There was no one in the crew he wanted to suspect. That did leave Fletcher, maneuvering everything, first to show the item to Jeremy and then to arrange to have it missing and himself the wronged party.

Why? was the next question. Some notion of giving the ship hell?

Some ploy to get himself shipped back to Pell with apologies? It was the first thing Fletcher had asked for.

Some bogused-up stick out of materials Fletcher could have gotten onplanet very easily, carvings Fletcher could have done, the whole thing his ticket to Pell if he could con a gullible junior-junior into serving as witness and setting the whole crew at odds with each other.

He sat alone in A deck rec and enjoyed a cup of coffee that didn’t entail going down to the mess hall where Fletcher was working, because the thoughts that were beginning to replay in his brain kept pointing to Fletcher as the origin of the problem.

His pocket-com had, however, messages. A lot of messages. From Toby:

I didn’t hear anything about it. It seems to me the junior-juniors might be playing a prank, and it got out of hand.

From Ashley: I didn’t hear anything. I assure you I would tell you if I had .

Nike came quietly up to him, and settled into the seat opposite his at the table.

“I don’t know who particularly had it in for Fletcher, but if you could kind of tell us what’s missing maybe we could look for it, in case, you know, somebody’s kind of scared to come forward?”

“In the whole ship? We’re not talking about something the size of a shipping cannister.”

“So what is it?” Nike said. “If it was in Fletcher’s cabin it was smaller than a shipping can. But how big could it be? Like a piece of jewelry?”

“Bigger.” He was down to games with people who’d be his life and death reliance when they replaced senior crew. “Tomorrow,” he said, hoping that the long hours of mainnight would weigh on someone’s conscience. “Tomorrow I might be more specific.”

Nike was the sort who’d badger after an answer. But she didn’t. She got up quietly and left. He saw her at the edge of the area talking to Bucklin, and saw Bucklin shake his head

Bucklin came to him after that, sat down in the seat Nike had vacated and leaned crossed arms on the table.

“This,” Bucklin said, “is poisonous. Jamie, let me tell them at least what we’re trying to find.”

“I’m not sure what we’re trying to find. I’m not sure I trust Fletcher.”

“You think he’s putting one over on us? Why?”

“To get back to Pell! I don’t know.”

“Possible,” Bucklin said. “But it’s also possible Vince—or Linda—”

“Or Sue. Or Connor, or Chad. Maybe we should just post armed guard. You and I stand in the corridor and shoot the first one that stirs toward another cabin.”

Bucklin’s shoulders slumped. “I’d rather think it was Fletcher.”

“So would I. That’s why I distrust my own wishes. Either he’s the best liar in lightyears about or he’s suffered an extreme injustice, and I don’t know which. I don’t know whether he’s laughing at us or whether someone in this crew has completely lost his senses.”

“I think we ought to pull a search.”

“For an object you could fit in a duffle and over an entire ship that’s been opened up to crew at dock.”

“If someone hid it during dock you can eliminate half the ring.”

“But not the entire damn hold.”

“Possible. But you’d have to suit to go in the hold. In the ring skin you don’t have to. If Fletcher hid it, it’d be in places Fletcher knows, right near the galley. If somebody else did it, that still means they’d play hob getting to half the ring during dock, and they’d probably not want to stay long or climb high to do it. I say we search the parts of the ring skin that are convenient during dock, and search in the storage lockers and the office near the galley stores first of all. That’s where Fletcher was hazed. That could be the place somebody might put it.”

It made sense. “But we’ve got Champlain out there.”

“I’d say if we’re going to find that thing we look now , while we’re still in Mariner space. If we wait till the deep dark, damn sure it’s going to be more dangerous to go larking about in the ring. But if we don’t do something to find it, we’ve got to live with that, too.—And maybe—maybe somehow it’ll materialize so we can find it. It’s a lot easier for it to turn up out there, you know, just kind of—by happenstance.”

“What’s the matter with walking in and laying it on my bunk?”

“Your bunk is in your cabin, and your door is visible up and down the corridor where we have cameras.”

“What do they think? I’d say go in and do it anonymously and then sit on the bridge and use the cameras?”

“I think everybody thinks this is a real serious issue that reflects pretty badly on whoever did it, and maybe right now somebody is real scared that he’s completely lost your trust. I think whoever did it had rather die than have it known.”

He looked up at Bucklin. “You don’t know who that someone is, do you?”

Bucklin’s face registered—something. “Listen to us,” Bucklin said. “ Listen to us talking to each other.”

“Hell,” JR said. Bucklin was his right arm, his friend, his closer-than-brother. And he’d just asked if Bucklin was hiding something from him.

“We’ve got to do something,” Bucklin said. “Yeah, we’ve got serious trouble out in front of us. But we’ve got guns for that, and we’ve got a warship riding beside us, protecting us. We’ve got defenses against the outside. This is right at our heart.”

“Go search where you think we ought to search.” He’d told Bucklin what the object was. It was time to relinquish that card regarding the rest of the crew. “Send the crew by twos to do it.”

“Including Fletcher?”

He drew a slow breath. “Everybody. Pair Jeremy with Linda for that duty. I’ll go with Fletcher, if nothing turns up right off.”

“Do the seniors know what’s going on?”

“I don’t think so. Alan does. I told him. But this is a nasty, distracting business. Bridge crew doesn’t need to know, if we can clean it up. Let’s just keep this quiet. We’re locked down during alterday. There’s just this next watch to look.”

“When did you hear that?”

“That’s the word that just came. We’re going to do a hard burn during mainnight, third watch. Straight into jump.” A thought occurred to him. “If it was in the ring skin and somebody didn’t secure it before we spun up, hell, no telling where it could get to.”

“Damn. That is a thought. Not to mention where it could get to during the burn. If somebody did hide it for a joke, and it slid under something, or into something, they might not be able to find it.”

“Wood and feathers. Low mass. God knows where it could get to.” It was frustrating, not even to know whether Fletcher could have chucked it down the waste disposal. Surely nobody on Finity had grown up without knowing about the hisa. Surely nobody on Finity could go into a cabin on a prank and taken something made of wood and real feathers, in ignorance the thing was valuable. Surely no one would destroy a thing like that. Take somebody’s entire stock of underwear and dispose of them in some unusual place, yes, in a minute. But not real wood. Everybody aboard had seen wood,—hadn’t they? Nobody was stupid enough to mistake its value. Nobody aboard disrespected the hisa, the only other intelligent life they’d found in the universe. That was just unthinkable, that someone in the Family would have that attitude.

Bucklin nodded and got up. “I’ll get started on it.”

Word came to the galley: they were going up before main-dawn. Jeremy fairly bounced with the news, and shoved a set of pans into the cupboard and latched it tight, nerves, Fletcher thought, feeling his own nerves jangled, but no part of Jeremy’s fierce anticipation.

“What’s going on?” he asked Jeff the cook—unwilling, at least uneasy, in appearing to be more ignorant than the juniors he’d had put in his charge.

“That ship,” Jeff said. “I imagine.”

Fletcher didn’t know what to imagine, and found himself peevish and short-fused. Stations behaved themselves and stayed on schedule, and so did station-dwellers. He habitually felt a tightness in the gut when even ordinary, minor things swerved slightly off from an anticipated schedule, perhaps the fact that so many truly sinister events in his life had begun that way. He was leaving Mariner, going even farther from Pell. He had an enemy who wanted to spite him, he’d tried to duck out of association with the family, and the juniors had conspired to hold on to him.

He didn’t say a word to Jeff. He just quietly left the galley and took a walk, as circular a proposition as on a station, a long stroll past the machine shop, the air quality station, lifesupport, all the gut and operations areas of the ship, where things were quieter and the feeling of urgency settled. Read-outs were on the corridor walls here. The noise of the machine shop working made him wonder what in all reason someone could be doing on the edge of destruction. It made him wonder so much he put his head in to look. And it was Tom T. using a drill press on a small metal plate.

“So what’s that?” he asked.

“Shower door latch.”

“Oh,” he said. It looked like one when he recalled their door. It was the socket of the door. He was almost moved to ask why Tom would be fixing a shower door if they were all going to be blown to hell and gone. But he just stood and watched. He’d never been in a machine shop. There was a certain comfort in knowing someone’s leaky shower was going to get replaced.

“Did you make that?”

Tom pushed up his safety goggles and wiped his nose. Tom had gray hair, large, strong-veined, competent hands. “We make about everything. Hell to get parts for old items, and most of this ship is old.”

“I guess it is.” A ship that traveled from port to port wasn’t going to find brands the same, that was certain. “Interesting place.”

“Ever done shop work?”

“No, sir.”

Tom grinned. “You want to take a turn at it sometime, you come on in. The youngers of this generation are all hellbent on pushing buttons for a living.”

“I might.” He figured he’d better get back to the galley before Jeff was hellbent on finding out where he’d gone or what he was up to. “I’ll give it a try. I’d better get back.”

“Any time,” Tom said. “Extra hands are always welcome.”

He’d wanted to ask—Have you heard about us going to do a burn tonight? but he didn’t end up asking. People just did their jobs. Jeremy was wired. Linda and Vince were jumpy. Tom fixed a shower door and Jeff was making lasagna.

He supposed it made a brittle kind of sense to do that. He, the stationer, he decided to take the long way back to the galley, and to go all the way around the ring.