Chapter 87: A day of Tali

Tali’s workshop was in the basement of the maintenance wing, two corridors past the staff cafeteria and one keycard reader past where most of the building stopped pretending to know what went on in this part of it.

It was hers.

She had earned it the way she earned everything, which was by being good at the thing she was good at for long enough that the people who handed out keycards stopped having an opinion about who held them. The room was twelve paces deep and eight wide. The shelving on the left wall was organized by component family. The shelving on the right wall was organized by repair status. The bench in the center was hers and only hers and held one specific configuration of tools that anybody who moved would hear about with a politeness sharp enough to cut.

Above the bench hung a hand-lettered cardboard sign in three marker colors.

*NO REFUNDS. NO RETURNS. NO COMPLAINTS.*

She had drawn it in her first week. The colors had been reinforced twice.

At twenty-three-eleven on the night of the drudger raid she sat alone on her stool in her workshop with her gum chewed flat against her back teeth and her zip-tie ponytail starting to give at the root, and she pulled the off-grid wafer out of her pocket and slotted it into a portable terminal invisible to every Defense Force network.

She loaded the file she had been adding to for six weeks.

-----

*Week one. Six weeks ago.*

She had been doing a routine post-deployment scan on Caleb’s suit after the Sector Six retrieval and the bypass had thrown an error code she had not seen before. The error code was a class of error code the manual filed under *manufacturing variance.* She had run the scan twice. The error code had repeated. She had pulled the suit’s pulse-reader array, cleaned it, reseated it, and run the scan a third time.

The error code had repeated.

That night the array came home with her. She ran a deep diagnostic on her own bench. The array was fine. It had not been throwing the error code. It had been reading a clean signal and translating it correctly. The error code was the system’s way of saying it had been given a signal it was not built to translate.

The official report went in under *intermittent component failure* and the array got replaced.

The waveform went onto a private wafer.

Caleb stayed out of that first report.

-----

The terminal in front of her showed the four waveforms now, stacked on top of each other, time-aligned, the first reading at the top and tonight’s reading at the bottom.

The first waveform was one line.

The fourth was two.

She rolled the gum to the other side of her mouth.

-----

The door at the top of the stairs to her workshop opened at twenty-three-fourteen.

She heard him on the third stair, because Caleb came down stairs the way a man came down stairs when he had been awake for nineteen hours and his right ankle had been compensating for two of them.

He came through the workshop door looking the way Caleb looked when he had not eaten in eight hours.

The smell that came with him was, faintly, the drudger’s.

She stayed on the stool.

"You took the freight lift," she said.

"I took the freight lift."

"Iharu’s with you?"

"Iharu’s upstairs. He’s eating my dinner."

"Smart man."

"Show me."

She gestured at the stool.

He sat.

She turned the terminal toward him.

-----

*Week three. Four weeks ago.*

Caleb had come back to the Seventh’s primary mechanic’s bay from a low-rank deployment with a clean kill log and a strange sweat pattern on his suit lining. Tali had been on shift. She had volunteered for the post-mission strip because nobody else had wanted to.

The suit came off in twelve minutes.

The lining had been warm in places that were not the standard warm places for a post-deployment suit. The bypass-array placement, where the sensor sat against his ribs low on the left, had been three degrees over baseline. She had taken a reading.

The reading had shown one line, where his bypass should have been, exactly where it should have been.

The reading had also shown, faint, half-amplitude, two centimeters offset to the side of the first line, a second line.

The second line had been keeping pace with the first.

The array got reseated. The reading got run three more times. The second line was there each time. It was getting clearer each time, as if the array were adjusting to its presence.

Nothing was filed.

The waveform went onto the wafer with the first one.

On the transit pod home that night she bought a fresh pack of gum and chewed an entire stick of it, thinking very carefully about the difference between a thing she wanted buried and a thing she had a professional obligation to report.

By the time the transit pod reached her stop, she had decided the two were the same thing.

After that, she kept watching.

-----

Caleb looked at the terminal, and she watched him.

Hundreds of diagnostic screens had passed under his eyes in the time she had known him. His face gave screens nothing to read. His father had taught him that blankness, and the blankness was the most accurate piece of his father’s parenting that had survived into his adulthood.

But she had also watched him look at hundreds of screens, and she had learned to read the small parts of his face that escaped anyway. The corner of his mouth. The angle of his thumb. The breath he took through his nose when the breath he took through his nose was deeper than it needed to be.

The deeper breath came at twenty-three-sixteen.

It came on the second waveform.

"Four weeks ago," Caleb repeated.

"You kept this from me."

"I did."

"Tell me why."

She had known the question was coming. She had practiced the answer in the way she practiced all the answers that mattered, which was by not practicing them, because the answers that mattered were always the ones she had to give without practicing.

"Because I knew what you would do when I told you."

"And what is it that I would do."

"You’d stop being able to think about anything else. And the next deployment was three days away. And the one after that was four days after the next one. And I needed you to stop being able to think about anything else only when I knew what I was looking at well enough to tell you what to do about it."

He was quiet.

She let him be quiet.

"Do you know what you’re looking at now."

"No."

"Tali."

"I know enough to show it to you. I don’t know enough to tell you what to do about it."

"Show me tonight’s."

-----

*Tonight. Twenty-two-forty.*

She had pulled tonight’s reading off his suit thirty minutes after the drudger had gone down, while the kill team had been tagging the carcass and Caleb had been at the cordon with his gloves off.

The reading had been the fourth waveform on the terminal.

The first line had been his.

The second line, four weeks ago at half amplitude offset by two centimeters, was now at the same amplitude as the first.

It was no longer offset.

The two lines, at twenty-two-forty tonight, had been overlapping.

They were not two lines anymore.

They were one line that the system had not yet figured out was one line.

She had saved this part off the comms because the Defense Force channel recorded, the cordon had cameras, and the freight lift had cameras too.

It got said in the workshop.

"Your bypass is not reading you anymore. It is reading something that is using you as a path."

-----

Caleb sat on her stool in her workshop under her sign for the length of a breath she counted to four.

His hand stayed away from his ribs.

His eyes stayed on the terminal.

He did the one thing she had hoped to avoid seeing, because it told her he had already known, in some part of himself, without needing a diagnostic to confirm it.

His chin dropped half an inch.

A nod.

-----

At twenty-three-twenty he stood up, pocketed her wafer, and left without thanks. The omission was the thanks. She understood it the way she understood most things he did, on a delay of about two seconds and in a vocabulary she lacked words for.

He stopped at the door.

"Tali."

"Yeah."

"How long do you keep this off the grid."

"Until you tell me otherwise."

"And after that."

"After that we have a different conversation."

Caleb looked at her for a second longer than he needed to.

Then the door closed behind him.

She sat in her workshop under her sign and rolled the gum across to the other side of her mouth and stared at the four waveforms on her terminal, and at twenty-three-twenty-six, alone, with the door closed and the network blind to the room she sat in, she finally let her shoulders drop.

The file had been hers to carry for six weeks.

It would stay hers to carry for as long as he needed her to carry it.

The sign above the bench cared about none of it.

She liked the sign for that.