Not for the File

Wednesday. I don't know what floor I am on, in any sense.

A Brakkan came to my desk.

Okay. You need to know a couple things here, so bear with me. I grew up in nine houses and the third one was Brakkan, so I know about doors and low ceilings and how you don't poke a person's ridges to see if they're real, and I know what a Brakkan sounds like on deck plate. The whole floor heard this one coming from two corridors off. Folks on the Queue have a saying for it, "Stone on the deck," and by the time he got to me the entire row had found something really interesting on their screens.

Two meters thirty. Forties. Slate and rust. There's a ridge on his left shoulder that's been sanded off, and I know you don't ask, so I just stared at it a little too long instead. Smooth, Abigail.

He said his name was Tukkar Omdor and he'd read my memo on the couplets, which, nobody's read my memo on the couplets. He said he had a ship and five people and a list of ninety-nine, and he needed somebody who could tell him what they'd do next. I said I was flattered, but I wasn't a field officer and I'd never been in a fight I didn't lose, and halfway through that sentence his brow plates came down. They hinge. It's like talking to a guy who's shut a door in his own face and left the rest of the face standing there.

I kept talking to the door. What else are you gonna do? I said I'd come if the Anarchist was my first target and I got to do it my way, and also I'd need to bring my plants.

The door opened on amber eyes, way up there.

"Plants," said Tukkar Omdor.

"Three," I said.

He gave that a good long think, the whole floor listening, and then he said, "Be where the plan says you'll be," and left, and you could hear him leaving for a while.

Counted my pencils. Twenty-six. Probably not enough.

Thursday. Belo, a noodle shop. Writing this on my knee.

I'm supposed to help him size up his team, so I've read the files, and whoever wrote them should get shaken. Auntie Quill's has one rule, painted over the counter, if you can read the person next to you, keep it to yourself. I've been asked to look at the sign twice now.

Assessment, Vesk Mirat. Ossari, ex-Dominion. Three guys came through the front of Auntie Quill's with knives while she was watching a soap on a screen with a crack across it, and she took them apart without standing all the way up and without pausing her show. The ones still conscious ended up lying on the floor through what I'd call a really long love scene. She's got a little coral crown, and the tips of it went pink, and the pink started heading down. She caught me noticing. It went gray so fast I could practically hear it.

I said, "That looked like it was a good episode."

She said, "No."

Recommendation: against. Wrote it down and gave it to Tukkar. She doesn't want to be on a team, I can't read her, and she looked at me like I was a stain on a bowl.

Abigail of last spring, you absolute soup. (Sorry.)

Assessment, Lio Twil. Phaedrae. Met him at a gala, or met at least three of him. A tall golden one was charming the host while a little gray one counted the silver, and when I dropped a fork I found a kid under the buffet, all elbows and sweater, who whispered "don't tell" and was gone. Then the same amber plates clicked around a corner and it hit me they'd been one person the whole time. You can hear it, the pieces re-seating. Like somebody shuffling roof tiles in the next room.

Recommendation: against, strongly.

Darling, we've framed this.

Assessment, Kellen Nine. Cultivar. Late twenties, if they even get to be an age. I watched him through glass on a sim floor, and he holds his pistols the way a kid holds a spoon, which I mean as a technical observation, real close to the body and total confidence. Those things only reach about a hand, so you have to get close enough to smell the person. He's matte all over, gold in the eyes, with faint lines where his panels meet, the plainest person I've ever seen in a universe where everybody else looks like they were grown out of a fruit. He finished, asked the tech if he'd done it right, then came out and looked at my bean cup and asked what it was.

"Lunch," I said.

"What is a lunch?"

I'd like to tell you I had a good answer for that. I didn't. Do you? Try it sometime. It's harder than it sounds.

Recommendation: I wrote "for," then crossed it out, 'cause the sentence I needed was longer than the box, and the form has these really small boxes.

Friday, or possibly Monday. The Abyss. And on the way back from it.

They took me to see the last one.

I'm gonna go slow so I get this right. What does the Goom look like? Nothing. That's the honest answer. You'd think it'd look like something, after the training films. It's a spot in the window where the stars get pulled out long and thin and then just stop, and when the ship got close I felt something way down in my back teeth that I never actually heard.

The prison hangs off the edge of all that on a platform, and every door was open. Yeah, I know, that's in all the reports, and I've read the reports, but it's different when they're open at you. Wheels of cells, turning, nobody in them, every guard already bagged and gone, something dripping, and then from a long way down, this little tune. A pipe. Somebody was playing it nicely.

Who was playing? Hang on, I'm getting there. Doctor Nym Selum is two meters of something like the inside of a seashell. There was a light behind him from the window and you could see straight in, and I don't mean that as a figure of speech. There's the throat, there's the pulse going, and then a second pulse, half a beat off, somebody else's rhythm in the same chest. He didn't stop playing when we came in. Finished the phrase first. Manners.

Then he looked at me, and his filaments stirred before his mouth did, so my bead jumped the gun and I got the end of his sentence first. "Consider me your first recruit." Then his lips caught up and started at the beginning.

I was scared, and I told Tukkar no, in the corridor and again at the dock. I said you can't take the most famous name in the Abyss out of the one place that's ever held him and put him on a ship with a galley. Tukkar said he'd found a door log in a closet and the Doctor knew things. Then he went back and told him to put the knife away, and the Doctor held up a pipe, and his shoulders made a little clicking noise that I'm told means he's having a nice time.

He said one more thing to me on the way past. He looked at my hand, the one with the pencil, and said, "You flinched. Good. It means the rest of you is paying attention."

I hadn't flinched. I've checked.

We were on that platform three quarters of an hour by my watch, and my soup sat on a shelf on the Fourth Floor for nine hours. Dot says it grew a skin and an opinion. An hour there's half a day everywhere else, everybody knows that, and knowing it doesn't help one bit.

Saturday. The Orchard. My cabin. MY CABIN.

It's got a window. Tukkar told somebody to give me the one with the window because, and I got this from the somebody, "Humans need to see out." Where'd he read that? No idea, and he isn't saying. I put the plants on the sill and told them it's gonna be fine.

You'll want the tour. Here's the tour. She's a hundred and eighty meters of retired prison transport, and it looks like every owner bolted something on without talking to the one before. Twin banks of engine drums. A heap of containers under tarps. A yellow truss bay with a crane in it. And an orange stripe on the nose some brave soul painted. Every fifth door still says which cell block you're in, and somebody's been writing jokes on the labels in teeny letters. BLOCK C: ASK ABOUT OUR LOYALTY PROGRAM.

There's one working speaker and six people aboard, so I've drawn up a rota, and I'm gonna get it laminated.

Speaker Rota. Draft for lamination

FIRST BELL: A. CHASE. WHO'S STILL UP (CALL-IN)

SECOND: T. OMDOR. "HOLD THE WEIGHT," LOW

THIRD: DR. SELUM. PIPE. SEE CONTENTS

FOURTH: V. MIRAT. "WARM BY MORNING"

FIFTH: L. TWIL (FIVE WAYS, TO BE ADVISED)

SIXTH: K. NINE. "THIS ONE"

Briefing at second bell, and Tukkar stood at the end of the galley with a pot going behind him and the cork board on the wall, ninety-nine mugshots, and went through the whole plan in maybe thirty words, every one of them sounding like he'd hauled it up a hill. Then he said, "Questions."

Nobody asked a question.

The Doctor checked a fingernail. Vesk was in the doorway being the color of the doorway, Lio or some of him was shuffling a deck with five different backs, and Kellen was gazing at the pot with enormous love. I put my hand up, all by myself, like a kid on her first day, which, yes.

Tukkar looked at my hand. "No issue," he said, and left.

There's slate in the corridor outside his cell, little chips of it, and there's slate on the top bunk too. How? Remember that slate. I'm going to.

Kellen asked if the Doctor was locked in. The Doctor, from the lower deck, through two doors, without raising his voice, said, "I'm in residence."

Who Is On This Ship, So I Stop Getting It Wrong

• Tukkar Omdor. Brakkan. In charge. Made of slate.
• Nym Selum. "The Doctor." Vael, the see-through one. Convicted of everything.
• Vesk Mirat. Ossari. Assassin. Changes color and resents it.
• Lio Twil. Pilot. Also Dash (loud), Ledger (numbers), Pip (small), and one other I haven't met.
• Kellen Nine. Cultivar. Gunfighter. Asks what things are.
• Me. The Brief.
• Up on the wall: ninety-nine people who got out of the Abyss. Tukkar calls it the board.