She left the MO dorms later than she had planned. it wasn't intentional but it may have been a kind of subconscious procrastination. Though she had told only her triad, every MO knew that she was not dining in the mess tonight.

Ever since his visit to the infirmary, she'd been watched more closely. When brushing her teeth, she would catch other officers staring at her in the mirror, their eyes quickly skittering away; conversations would stop when she stepped into the rec room. Bard tried to compensate for the silence, making a point to project their banal conversations to every corner of the room. Some of the MOs treated her as though she were radioactive, others were obsequious, checking on her patients for her and fetching her water. Their supervising MO III, Troilus, who was almost comically absent most of the time, started lingering after rounds and joining them in the mess. He was able to use his influence to get her young deck officer transferred to the Spire. Their triad was invaded by interlopers who did not know the language the three of them had developed. Beatrice could tell that Adriana was irritated by it.

The whispers followed her from the gym to the bathroom. She'd showered and when she returned to the bathroom mirror, someone had put a condom on the sink next to her hairbrush. She ignored it, though she had verified that the results of his quarterly STI screen were negative. Even though that was unlikely to happen tonight. Probably. She returned to her berth and put on a clean uniform: dress, jacket, stockings, boots. MOs didn't wear gloves, they were unsanitary. She pinned her still wet hair back in a bun. Bypassing the stairs that she normally would take down to the mess two floors down, she continued on to the lifts.

Her world was essentially circumscribed to three levels: the rostral mess hall, just off of the atrium, the MO dormitories and one floor up from there the sprawling infirmary with its alcoves and ORs, its bustling droids and constant noise. They would occasionally pull shifts in the fore sickbay, a smaller, lower acuity care center staffed almost exclusively by MO Is. The more complex cases were sent to the rostral infirmary where she was primarily stationed; the MO joke was that the fore sickbay was for vitamin waters and sticking plaster.

The ship had formal terms: fore and aft, deck and hull. The MOs had their own language, using the term rostral to refer to the area that served the bridge, officers suites, infirmary and the nice mess hall, while they called deeper and more obscure parts of the ship caudal. It had been amusing to see their parlance trickle into the lexicon of the ship generally. As a rule, the more rostral one wandered, the nicer the ship became, and just like the human body, the caudal side was shittier.

While the MO quarters had the distinction of being rostral, they were nowhere near the level of luxury that served the officer's facilities that occupied the floors above them. As the lift ascended, officers gave her looks when she didn't get off with each successive floor. She didn't belong up here. When the doors finally opened on the floor that housed the suites of the high command, she made to leave but a bridge ensign grabbed her arm and asked "Are you lost?"

Beatrice shook her head. At least the last time she was up here she had a folder and a job to do. This time she felt exposed and small, with nothing but a scrap of paper that had been delivered to her during rounds this morning, summoning her back to his room. To stymie the speculation of the bridge ensign, she turned down the hall away from the suites and headed towards the conference rooms.

She found a bathroom. The ones on her dormitory floor were loud with the constant slamming of stall doors and running faucets. The MO showers were an open room with drains in the floor, the showerheads so close together that her towel invariably got wet as it hung on its hook. Everything was tile and the grout was spotted with mold. This bathroom was silent with marble finishes and spotless chrome taps.

There had been no details in the note, just a handwritten summons to his suite. The note was unsigned but she recognized his handwriting. The other MOs all assumed that she was going to be propositioned, hence the condom. Propositions were the cornerstone of carnal Alcean relationships: a question was posed and an agreement made. What was unclear was whether she had any ability to say no in this context. If he asked, could she refuse him? Or would she be court marshalled for not following orders?

Beatrice was analytical enough that she could examine her response to him at a remove, cooly note her elevated pulse, the heat in her cheeks. She'd always found him striking, tall and possessing a crisp angularity and in her world where everything was black and white and grey, his coloring drew her eye. There was certainly attraction there, but she didn't want to be ordered to service him.

Alceans weren't supposed to feel this way. Alceans weren't supposed to feel at all. Sex was sex, awkward and occasionally messy and almost always disappointing, especially the first time. But that thought did not sit easily with her. Beatrice could intuit from her own feelings, as murky as they were, that the tension she felt when she took Armitage's hand was perhaps more than just sexual. There was a hunger that casual sex was unlikely to satisfy. She read tawdry paperbacks and poems as though she were doing research for a paper, trying to find the cipher that would explain this incorporeal heart ache.

She met her own gaze in the mirror. She was reading far too much into this. That stupid day in cold storage was nothing, just two people of similar ages pretending for an hour that they were the kind of people that had nicknames. He was probably going to ask for another inhaler. She steeled herself and left the washroom, marching down to where the carpeted hall of the officer's suites began. The rooms here had no numbers, just names on plaques beside the door. She paused outside the one said that said Hux, calling up her blank Alcean affect and settling it over her face.

But when he answered her timid knock on his door, she couldn't help but smile at him.

"Hello Beatrice," he said. He stood to the side and gestured her through his door. She stopped just inside the threshold and a too familiar, sweet smell assaulted her. She could feel the blood drain from her face.

The first time she remembered being able to celebrate New Years at the lodge, she had been thirteen. On the bus, Bard acted calm, like he'd already done this a dozen times before. She felt pressured to imitate him in his nonchalance, even though the sight of the lodge hunkered on the hillside, glowering windows like the eyes of a satiated owl, always struck her as menacing. As they disembarked, Bard's confidence evaporated and if they had been younger they probably would've held hands.

Inside, long tables stretched across the length of the huge, cavernous hall. The ceilings were not high, so the hall felt claustrophobic, dark beams crisscrossing overhead like the grate over an oubliette. The windows that looked out over the city should have helped, but instead they compounded the feeling of being underground. Salt, dust, and food particles ground against the soles of her boots as they took a seat near the stage. It was too stuffy and too loud.

It took a long time for everyone to be seated, so by the time the dark-robed government officials escorted the mothers and their three year old children to the tables on the stage, the mood was restless and tense. The hall fell silent, so much so that when one of the mothers suppressed a sob the sound seemed to echo. The mothers and their children were seated and served first. Beatrice was transfixed by one mother in particular. She bounced her toddler on her knee and kissed the little girl's cheeks as the child touched her face with her small hand, The mother's face held fierce love and resigned sadness.

The wailing began at when they were served the dessert course, which filled the hall with a sickly sweet smell undercut with a sharp, medicinal astringency. The one that Beatrice had been watching didn't cry, but her hand shook as she spooned the drugged dessert into her daughter's eager mouth. She held the girl against her chest, cradling her head with her hand and rocking her as the child drifted off into sleep. The woman looked far away, her gaze unfocused. A pall had passed over the rest of the crowds, watching them from their long tables, laden with food that was untouched, as though the clanking of silverware would be sacrilege.

One of the women stood up and started screaming when the officials appeared again at the end of the dais. Beatrice recognized the mayor, the minister of education, and few of the teachers from the General Academy. They positioned themselves behind the mothers and their sleeping children and as the education minister processed down the long table, the children were extracted from their mothers' arms and enveloped in the dark robes. The minister of education snatched the mothers' grasping hands away, masking it as a handshake, to thank them for their service to Alcea. When the children had been borne away, Beatrice, Bard, and the rest of the adults of the North sector city where they lived stood and applauded. The mother that Beatrice had been watching now wept, raking her fingers down her cheeks in bleeding red lines.

When they sat again, Beatrice looked down the table, to see if anyone else was as deeply disturbed as she was. But the food was heaped onto plates and the conversations rose around them, drowning out the wailing of the mothers who had just lost their children. But she knew it wasn't just her. Bard took her hand and the whole way home he looked haunted.

Every year after that, Bard and Beatrice took the advice of the older students at the academy and came to New Years drunk, sitting well away from the high stage. It helped them stay blind to the searching eyes of the older women, and, should one of them approach, it made conversation with this teary-eyed stranger who bore them simpler.

All of tears and the preemptive drinking were silly, sentimental. They were not the children of husbands and wives, or bastards got by forbidden love affairs, but the spawn of selective breeding, matches predetermined by the government based on physical and intellectual attributes. There was no reason to be disturbed, the women were bred when it was time for them to be bred, and then they went back to their lives. Bard got used to it, Beatrice never did.

She could smell it in here. Armitage had set up two place settings on either side of his desk, and even if she couldn't' see the dessert in the warming dish, she knew it was the New Year's pudding. She could also appreciate the savory, meat-filled pastry and clear broth that were Alcean specialties. She could feel bile trickling up her throat.

"What's wrong with you?" Armitage asked sharply.

"It's just the pudding," she croaked. He nodded and walked over to the dish. He covered the distance from the door to the desk rapidly and deftly lifted the lid of the warming dish. To her great surprise he took a spoon from the table and dug it directly into the pallid dessert, tasting it without enjoyment.

"It's too sweet but it's not rancid." He picked up the pudding dish and slid it directly into the trash bin, placing it past her in the hallway and shutting the door. "Is that better?"

"I'm so sorry," she said. She guessed that he had been trying to do something nice for her and she had overreacted. His face was pinched and pale with anger; she had embarrassed him. She was not used to gifts or gestures and the whole thing seemed silly, like he was humbling himself before her. This had obviously entailed some but not enough research into her homeworld.

"Do I need to toss the rest of it in the rubbish?" She shook her head and waited for him to cue her. Was she going to be dismissed? Had she ruined it?

"Good." He sat down at his desk in front of his plate and gestured for her to sit with an impatient flick of his hand. Once she was perched on her chair, he exploded out of his and left the room through the other door. She had guessed that his office adjoined his private quarters, but being able to actually see the foot of his bed through the open door seemed altogether too intimate. He reemerged carrying a bottle of wine and set it on the desk between them after popping the cork. He poured a measure without splashing into her stemmed glass. She didn't think they had such things aboard: she had only ever drunk out of functional plastic cups. They began to eat in tense silence.

"Thank you," she said quietly, "I haven't tasted these in years."

"I can see why Alcean food hasn't caught on more broadly. The soup tastes like water and the meat in the pastry is flinty. Both of them want for seasoning. You look surprised." Betrayed by her face yet again, Beatrice struggled to find the right words. She couldn't say that because of he seemed generally joyless she had assumed he wasn't an epicurean.

"You seem very knowledgeable."

"I spent a lot of time in kitchens in my youth," he said and did not elaborate.

"We Alceans aren't known for our culinary talents," she said, trying a lame joke. She wanted to add his nickname, but worried that the moment had passed and he was trying to get through this awkward dinner as quickly as possible.

"Obviously." He said this with a snort, so perhaps the evening could be salvaged.

"This was very thoughtful," she tried again. That seemed like an appropriate thing to say. She watched him closely to see how it would land.

"Well, the dessert could have been better." The words were thrown up a like a wall.

"I bet it wasn't a traditional New Year's pudding," she challenged, growing frustrated that he was giving her nothing. She wanted to draw him out, for him to drop his defenses and be the person he'd been in the cold storage room.

"That's exactly what I told the cooks to make. Maybe if you had tried it, you would have a different assessment." That worked better. He was angry but at least he was engaged.

"If it was truly authentic, then you would be on the floor."

"Excuse me?" he asked, his wine caught halfway between his mouth and the desk.

"They lace it with sedatives. New Years is when they separate the three-years from the mothers. And we all get to watch." At his request she recounted the horrible tradition, described the dark-robed government officials who scooped up the limp children and carried them into the dark

"So everyone is complicit in it, not just 'they'," he said softly afterwards.

She hadn't thought about it that way. She had never been given a choice in where she was sent, and her natural aptitude and test scores had given her over to medicine at ten. She had been manufactured to suite a specific purpose. The concept of choice as it applied to challenging the system she'd been bred into was alien to her. It was imperfect, but everything was imperfect. Resistance had never occurred to her. She didn't like this feeling, that she was part of the structure that drugged babies, that she had been blind to her obedience, or that obedience itself was optional.

"Now I've gone and upset you again, haven't I? I'm sure that the mess is still serving dinner, if you would like to leave."

"I'm not upset."

"You're lying. For an Alcean you have the most transparent face I've ever seen. Or I've suddenly become a Jedi." She couldn't help but laugh and her voice unlocked something in his face too; he finally seemed to relax by a degree.

"I'll stay, thank you."

"But I like it," he said, very quietly after a few beats of silence.

"What do you like?"

"Your face. I like that I can tell what you're thinking," he watched her very carefully to gauge her reaction, "Now you look puzzled. What is there to be confused about?"

"There is a word that is just at the tip of my tongue but it's escaping me. It's a military word."

"Why are you thinking about 'military words'?" he chuckled with just a touch of meanness, as though it was absurd that she should trouble herself about such things.

"What word would you use to describe when you are exposed in battle? When you ride out to meet some danger? I want to say soiree, but I know that isn't right."

"Sortie," he answered quickly, relaxing back in his desk chair and taking a sip of his wine, "Why?"

"Because you have finally come out of your fortress."

"Are we at war, then?" he asked, and his voice seemed huskier, the imperial accent softened. He leaned forward now, and he seemed to be breathing more heavily. His pupils were huge and focused intently on her mouth. He swallowed. For her part, she noticed that she was giving him a half smile and chewing her lip, as though to keep his interest there. He took a very deep breath and pushed away from the desk, draining the rest of his wine in one long pull.

"You haven't touched your drink," he said.

"No," she agreed, "I'm working overnight tonight."

"Oh. I didn't realize. I suppose someone has to work."

"I work third shift for the next few days, perhaps I can see you after that?" she said quickly, before realizing that he had not issued an invitation. The desire to come back, to keep riding this feeling, this electric anticipation that had supposedly been trained out of her had made her over-eager. She could stay silent and let her comment die in the air around them or she could elect to force something into existence. She was nothing and he sat in a seat of tremendous power, so it was absurd for her to even think that she had a choice, but she decided to push all the same, now that he had made her see that the boundaries were not perhaps involuble. "Maybe you can show me what foods make you distraught?" He laughed in his harsh, abrupt way.

"I suppose I can be bothered to emerge from my redoubt for you."

"I'd like that." She was having a hard time making eye contact, every time she did, she couldn't help but smile.

"I hope you have a good shift, Bea."