Chapter Text
Liam had timed it perfectly. Shiloh was alone by the observation deck, arms crossed against the railing, watching the last shuttle cycle through the Arxis with the kind of stillness she only got when she thought no one was looking. No Phineas hovering. No siblings running interference. Just her, and five clear minutes before the next debrief.
“You’ve got the look of someone plotting an escape,” he said, dropping into the space beside her before she could decide whether to let him.
Shiloh didn’t turn. “I’ve got the look of someone doing my job.”
“Same thing, some days.” He leaned into the railing, angled just enough that she’d have to actually look at him to keep ignoring him properly. “You should let someone else carry it for an hour. I hear I’m very capable.”
“I hear you’re very late for wherever you’re supposed to be.”
He opened his mouth to answer that—he had an answer, he always had an answer—when the door at the far end of the deck hissed open and a voice that wasn’t Shiloh’s cut clean through his rhythm.
“—no, I told you, it has to be the east corridor, he takes the east corridor after briefings—”
Liam turned. So did Shiloh, finally, which was almost worse, because now she’d looked away from him for someone else entirely.
Talia rounded the corner already mid-argument with herself, tablet in one hand, utterly unaware she’d walked into the one five-minute window on the entire deck that had been spoken for. She clocked Liam a half-second before she clocked Shiloh, and her whole face did something complicated and fast—recalculation, mostly, the look of someone watching a plan collapse in real time.
“Oh,” she said. “You’re not Micah.”
“Startlingly, no,” Liam said.
Shiloh looked between the two of them with the particular patience of someone who dealt with far stranger things on a weekly basis and had decided this didn’t clear the bar. “I have a debrief,” she said, and pushed off the railing, and was gone before either of them thought to stop her—not that Liam had a plan for stopping her that wouldn’t have looked exactly like what it was.
Which left him alone on the observation deck with a stranger who was still holding her tablet like it had personally betrayed her.
“You cost me the east corridor,” she said, like an accusation.
“I’m sorry—did I book it?” Liam gestured at the empty deck, the closed door, the general absence of anyone else. “I was here first. This was a private conversation you very much interrupted.”
“It didn’t look private. It looked like she was seconds from leaving.” Talia’s eyes narrowed, sharp and assessing in a way that made him feel, briefly, like a variable she was solving for. “You’re Liam.”
“You say that like it explains something.”
“It explains several things, actually.” She was already turning back toward the door, tablet tucked under her arm, her entire posture recalibrating around a new plan. “Try not to be in the east corridor tomorrow, either.”
“I don’t take requests.”
“Clearly,” she said, without looking back, “neither does she.”
The door hissed shut behind her before he could decide whether that last one had actually landed, or whether he only felt like it had.
She’d learned, by the third day, exactly which corners of the Agency Micah favored—the ones with good light, the ones close enough to the labs that he’d have an excuse if anyone asked why he’d stopped walking. She’d built the whole approach around a five-minute gap between his morning briefing and whatever Judah dragged him into next. Clean, deliberate, low-risk.
She had not built it around Liam already being there.
He was leaned against the wall exactly where she needed to be standing, arms crossed, looking for all the world like he had every right to occupy that particular six feet of hallway at that particular time.
“You’re doing the tablet thing again,” he said, without looking at her.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“The face you make when you’re three moves into a plan and something’s about to ruin it.” He finally glanced over, entirely too pleased with himself. “You’re doing it right now.”
“I’m doing it because you’re standing in my hallway.”
“It’s a public hallway.”
“It’s Micah’s hallway. Between debrief and lab, every day this week, give or take four minutes.” She didn’t bother hiding the irritation—there wasn’t a version of this where pretending calm bought her anything with him specifically. “Which you would know, if you’d done the math instead of just loitering.”
Something flickered across his face—not quite offense, more like being caught out. “I don’t loiter. I position.”
“You position badly, apparently, since you’re currently standing exactly where I need to be.”
“Funny,” Liam said, “Shiloh takes this hallway too. Later. After the labs clear out.” He said it like a fact he was daring her to do something with, chin tipped just slightly, watching for the reaction.
Talia filed it away without meaning to—useful information, annoyingly—and hated that some small, competitive part of her logged it as later, then, not now, like there was a schedule to be respected between them now. There wasn’t. There absolutely wasn’t.
“Then you’ll want to move,” she said instead, “so I can finish before your window opens.”
“Or,” Liam said, pushing off the wall, unhurried in a way that made her want to shove him bodily out of the corridor, “you could just admit this is easier when we’re not tripping over each other.”
“This is not easier. Nothing about you is easier.”
“You’re still standing here arguing about it instead of leaving.”
She was. That was, infuriatingly, true. Talia opened her mouth to say something that would fix that fact, and found—for one ugly, unhelpful second—that she didn’t actually have it ready.
Footsteps rounded the corner behind them—too early, too fast—and whatever window either of them had been counting on collapsed at once. Micah passed through with barely a glance, deep in conversation with Elijah, gone before Talia could so much as reposition.
Liam watched her watch the empty hallway. “Tomorrow, then,” he said, entirely too satisfied for someone who’d also just lost his shot.
“Don’t be in my hallway.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he said, already walking away. “I’ll be in mine. Try not to trip into it.”
“Absolutely not,” Patience said, watching Talia stalk past the mess hall entrance with the particular gait of someone composing an argument she hadn’t gotten to have yet. “What did he do now?”
“Existed,” Michelle said, not looking up from her tray. “Loudly. In a hallway she needed.”
“Again?”
“Third time this week.” Michelle finally glanced toward the door Talia had just vanished through. “She’s going to put him through a wall eventually.”
“Good,” Patience said. “I’ll hold her jacket.”
“You could just tell her to schedule around you,” Judah said, unhelpfully, while Liam scrubbed a hand down his face for the second time in one conversation.
“I don’t control her schedule.”
“You control yours.”
“I control mine and she still manages to be in it.” Liam dropped into the chair across from him with the particular energy of a man personally offended by geography. “It’s like she’s doing it on purpose.”
“Is she?”
“I don’t know! That’s the infuriating part!” He said it too loud, loud enough that a couple of heads turned two tables over, and didn’t notice, and Judah—who noticed everything that was funny—very much did.
Talia found Liam already in the archive room when she got there, which meant either he’d started coming here on purpose or the universe had simply run out of other places to put them both.
“You could knock,” she said.
“It’s a shared archive.”
“It’s a shared archive I was using.”
“Were you.” He didn’t move from the terminal. “Funny, it looked empty when I got here.”
“That’s because I hadn’t sat down yet, since someone was blocking the only working terminal.”
“There are three terminals.”
“There are three terminals and you’re at the good one.”
Liam looked at the terminal, then at her, with the specific, maddening slowness of someone deciding whether an argument was worth having. “You’re unbelievable,” he said, but got up anyway, dragging the chair from the middle terminal over to the one he’d vacated with enough force that it scraped audibly across the floor. “There. Happy?”
“Thrilled,” Talia said, and sat down without another word, and didn’t say thank you, and neither of them mentioned that he hadn’t actually needed to leave at all.
“They’re doing it again,” Josiah said, nodding toward the far end of the corridor where Liam and Talia were locked in what appeared to be a fully silent standoff—no words, just two people refusing to be the one who moved first, blocking the doorway between them like a border dispute.
Gala followed his gaze. “Doing what?”
“That.” He gestured vaguely. “Whatever that is.”
“I think they just don’t like each other.”
“No,” Josiah said slowly, tilting his head, something working behind his eyes that he didn’t say out loud yet. “But... I don’t think that’s all it is.”
Michelle found Patience already in the med bay break room, boots up on the second chair, going through charts with the specific irritation of someone who’d rather be doing anything else.
“You look like you want to fight someone,” Michelle said, dropping into the seat across from her and shoving Patience’s boots off it first.
“I want to fight several someones. It’s a long list.” Patience didn’t look up. “Add yourself to it if you took my chair on purpose.”
“I took your chair because you were using it as furniture instead of a chair.” Michelle stole half her tea without asking, which was its own kind of hello. “What’s actually wrong?”
“Talia. Again.” Patience set the chart down with more force than it needed. “She cornered me in the east wing asking about Micah’s schedule. Phrased like she was being casual about it. She was not being casual about it.”
Michelle’s face didn’t change, exactly, but something in her shoulders did. “She do the thing?”
“She did the thing.”
The thing being, specifically, Talia’s gift for finding the seam in someone’s confidence and pressing on it just hard enough to leave a mark without ever quite crossing into something Michelle could call her out for directly. Michelle still remembered the conversation months back—Talia, all soft concern, wondering aloud whether Michelle ever worried Micah needed someone easier. Someone who didn’t come with as much armor. She’d said it like she was being kind. Michelle had thought about it for three days before she’d been furious enough to stop.
“I don’t like her,” Michelle said, flat, like a fact rather than an opinion.
“I don’t like her either, and I don’t even have a reason as good as yours.” Patience reclaimed her tea, glared at the now-lower water line, and drank it anyway. “But—”
“But Liam’s worse.”
“Liam’s worse,” Patience agreed, immediately, no hesitation.
Michelle exhaled through her nose, something almost like a laugh. “It’s insane that we agree on that so fast.”
“It’s not insane. It’s correct.” Patience pulled her knees up, chin resting there, staring at nothing. “At least Talia wants something specific. She’s calculating, she’s manipulative, she made you doubt yourself for a week over something that wasn’t even true—I’d still put her in a room with Shiloh before I’d put him in one.”
“That’s a low bar.”
“It’s an accurate bar.” Patience’s voice sharpened, the clinical calm dropping out of it entirely. “I watched him corner her by the observation deck last week. Nothing happened. Nothing was going to happen, she wasn’t going to let anything happen. But he didn’t leave when she gave every signal short of walking away, and he wouldn’t have left if she hadn’t done that either.”
Michelle went quiet at that in a way that had nothing to do with Talia at all.
“Phineas know?” she asked.
“Phineas knows everything about her, eventually. Doesn’t mean he’s fast about it.” Patience shook her head. “I’m not saying we do anything. She can handle herself, and she doesn’t need us hovering any more than she needs him circling. I’m saying I noticed. And I don’t love that Talia’s the one who noticed it first, before either of us did.”
That landed harder than Patience probably meant it to. Michelle turned her cup slowly in her hands, thinking about the odd, clipped way Talia had mentioned it in passing days ago—not concern, not exactly, more like someone cataloguing a fact she found useful. He doesn’t take a hint. You’d think someone would’ve said something by now. Michelle had brushed it off at the time, too busy being annoyed at Talia existing near Micah to register it as anything but noise.
“She wasn’t wrong, though,” Michelle said slowly. “About him.”
“No. She wasn’t.” Patience made a face like the admission cost her something. “I hate that the worst person in this hallway has good instincts about the second-worst person in this hallway.”
“Bold of you to only rank Talia second-worst.”
“I’m being generous. It’s a mood.”
Michelle huffed something that wasn’t quite a laugh, and let the subject drop there, because there wasn’t anywhere good left to take it—not without watching Shiloh more closely than either of them had any right to, not without doing exactly the kind of interference none of them actually wanted to be the one to start.
“For the record,” Michelle added, after a moment, “I still don’t like her.”
“Never said you should,” Patience said. “I just said she’s not wrong about everything.”