Page 32
“My grandfather built them. He left me his tools and about forty unfinished hulls when he died.” Simple. Not performing it. “I finished his, then started my own.”
“How many do you have?”
“A couple dozen.”
“Where do they go?”
“Shelves. The ops center has two. Pike tried to borrow one.”
“Let me guess.”
“I explained that ships in bottles have one function, which is being in the bottle, and that removing them from the bottle ends that function.”
“How did Pike take that?”
“He said that was a very Tor way to look at it.”
“He’s not wrong.”
He said nothing, which told her everything she needed to know. The Lantern bumped his arm again, as if in agreement.
“Do you ever feel that way about the security work? Like it only holds within its own internal logic?”
Tor took his time, genuinely thinking, not merely performing thought. “Sometimes. The difference is the ships don’t have to write incident reports.”
Mirelle laughed. Not the dinner-party kind, and not the I’m being charming kind she’d been running for years. The real kind. It arrived before she checked whether it was appropriate and came up from somewhere she hadn’t been managing.
The Lantern blazed gold-white. Tor’s eyes dropped to it. Then to her. The Lantern settled back to amber and drifted on. “Your creature,” he said.
“I know.”
“It responds to —”
“Emotional honesty. Yes. Bexley has a whole pen for it. Possibly two now.”
“What pen?”
“Lavender. Turns out genuine looks lavender from the outside.”
His face had shifted to the third one, the unnamed one, and stayed there. “You don’t laugh like that often.”
“I used to.” She kept her eyes on the path. “Before things got reworked.” He didn’t rush to fill the silence. Which was the right thing; he seemed to know when a silence was working. “I’m getting better at it. The unguarded version.”
“I know. I’ve seen the data.”
She stopped walking. “You read Bexley’s emotional honesty charts.”
“I read all the data.”
“Tor, you have a color-coded spreadsheet about my laughing?”
“It’s relevant to the overall picture.”
“That is not —” She laughed again, short and surprised, and the Lantern pulsed gold for two seconds before settling. “You are — that is — I don’t know what to do with that information.”
“Note it.”
“Under what?”
