Chapter 39 Episode 39: Everywhere

Akira’s POV

The system’s pause was, I was discovering, its own kind of strange.

I had been operating under a quest structure since I woke up in this planet. Jumping from one mission and feeding into the next, the progression constant enough that I had stopped expecting the space between deliveries as space and started experiencing each mission as a transition.

Something finished, something new arrived, the gap between them was narrow enough to step across without noticing the crossing.

This entire thing was different. The hold screen had been sitting in the corner of my peripheral vision for eleven days now and with the patience of something that was not dreaming of going anywhere and I felt my system was being sarcastic enough not to apologize for this unplanned break.

I had filled the eleven days with training and visits to the Spirit well to find Gleam, our ramen shop and then there was Sena’s terrible canteen soup plus the slow ongoing project of getting better at things I had been building toward since the last gate experience.

And then, there was Kael.

Mostly Kael, if I was to be precise about it.

Everything had started practically. He was on the fourth floor Thursday mornings and that was where I trained. My training had become more productive with his corrections than without them and this was a fact I had accepted without making it complicated.

Then he had a council review in the western district and that district was on my way to the housing unit so it made sense to walk together.

And that we did, the conversation that happened on that walk was the kind that happened without a specific agenda and moved through things without deciding to.

He soon left me, when we parted ways outside the review building, with the feeling of someone who had been somewhere comfortable and wasn’t ready to let it go.

Then it happened again. And again.

By the seventh day, I had stopped tracking it as it had slowly become our new pattern and I started simply living inside of it, which was another shocking thing as I didn’t seem to be so against it like before.

He attended a gate survey in the northern monitoring zone and I simply went along with him because the northern zone was running some unusual cross-signature activity that I was curious about and curiosity was a sufficient reason.

He had a meeting with the guild’s equipment procurement lead and I sat in the corridor outside reading the mission reports from the previous week because I had the time and the corridor had good light.

He ran a routine perimeter check along the eastern boundary at six in the morning and I was there because I had been awake since five and the eastern boundary in the early morning had a quality I had started to appreciate... the city at that hour, the gate monitors running their automated cycles, the particular colour of the sky before full daylight.

He did not ask why I kept appearing in his vicinity. I did not bother to explain it. The arrangement existed in the comfortable space between us where things that were understood didn’t require articulation.

What I was becoming aware of however, quietly and without drama, was that his presence had developed a specific quality in my days. The days he was around had a different feeling from the days he wasn’t, and the atmosphere of the days he wasn’t had been noticeable in a way I hadn’t anticipated before the pattern existed.

The word for this, the accurate one, was addiction. I was aware of this. Gleam had used a different word when I had tried to describe it to her... ’home’ she had said.

I had told her her words were not helpful, and she had looked at me with those blue eyes and said nothing further, her way of telling me the word was more accurate than I was ready for.

I was working on being ready.

On the ninth day of my break, Kael had a full morning of administrative work in his office building, the kind of morning that didn’t require my presence in any practical sense.

I trained on the fourth floor, visited Gleam, ate at the ramen shop, and came back to the guild in the afternoon to find three mission reports on the board I wanted to review.

The afternoon was fine. Productive, even. The mission reports were informative and Sena stopped by for twenty minutes and said something that made me laugh and the guild canteen had a new soup that was actually less terrible than the previous one.

The afternoon was fine and I spent most of it aware of the specific absence of a particular quality in the room.

This was becoming a problem. Or an answer, depending on how I looked at it, and I was trying to look at it honestly even when honestly was less comfortable than the alternatives.

***

On the tenth day he had an early inspection at a gate cluster in an industrial district and as usual, I was there at six fifteen, which was fifteen minutes before he arrived, sitting on the steps of the monitoring post with my jacket collar up against the morning cold and the east still dark above the roofline.

He stopped when he saw me. Looked at me on the steps with an expression he used when he was thinking about something. Then he came, sat beside me, in the way he was always close, and we looked at the industrial district waking up around us.

"The cluster’s showing unusual formation patterns," I said, because that was the practical reason I was here.

"I know," he said. "I read Reiss’s report this morning."

"Interesting cross-signature activity in sectors three and four."

"Yes."

We sat with that for a moment.

"Akira," he called out.

"Yes." I answered nervously. What could he possibly want to say?

"You were here before me." He stated. He didn’t leave room for any objections.

"The cross-signature..."

"You were here before me," he said again, with the quality he used when he was saying the true thing rather than the presented thing.

I looked at the industrial district. A vehicle moved through the far intersection. The gate cluster’s monitoring equipment ran its automated cycle and the readout on the post beside us updated with the unhurried regularity of something doing its job without needing acknowledgment.

"The cluster is genuinely interesting," I said.

The corner of his mouth moved. A smirk, the one that was present in the set of his expression rather than the movement of his lips, the one I had started cataloguing without knowing when.

"It is, isn’t it?" His laughter boomed in the air.

We stayed for another two hours while he ran the inspection and I followed the cross-signature patterns and the industrial district completed its transition from dark to morning and the day built itself around us in the ordinary way that it did when you were paying attention to something else.

At some point his shoulder settled against mine and neither of us moved away from it, neither of us said anything about it. The contact was warm and specific, I filed it under the long list of things I was planning to address when I was ready for the accurate word Gleam had offered.

The hold screen blinked once again in my peripheral vision.

I was still on hold huh?

I was starting to understand that the system’s pause might have been less about the next mission and more about this... the eleven days, the gate surveys and the corridor outside his meeting and the eastern boundary at six in the morning and the industrial district steps.

The space it was giving me to discover something it probably already knew about, in the way it seemed to know most things before I did.

Gleam, through the bond at a low ambient range, ’Well. Anything yet?’

"I’m still working on it," I said, quietly, under the sound of the monitoring equipment.

Kael glanced at me.

"Gleam," I said.

He made a sound that acknowledged my statement as a sufficient explanation and looked back at the cluster readouts.

His shoulder was warm against mine.

The city moved through its morning and the system held its pause and I sat on the steps of a monitoring post in the industrial district next to the most powerful hunter on Dune and thought about the word Gleam had offered.

I thought about the atmosphere in the days he wasn’t around and I thought about eleven days of following him through gate surveys and procurement meetings and perimeter checks and finding, every time, that the practical reason I had given myself was real but secondary.

The primary reason was simpler than I had been letting it be.

I was working on letting it be simple. It had to be simple and nothing complicated attached.