Page 35 of Red Scale Daddy
Loklo sees it. He always sees too much, which is why I have considered firing him twice a month for years and never done it.
He sets the mop aside. “Is this a death wish?”
I look down the length of the bar. In the quiet, the place seems to listen with every crack in the walls. The refrigeration unit clicks behind me. Somewhere overhead, station pipes knock as the night cycle shifts temperature. Shot in the Dark smells like old fights, stale smoke, and the thousand small failures people pour into glasses because they do not know where else to put them.
“No,” I say.
Loklo’s eyes narrow. “That answer was too quick.”
“It’s the answer.”
“Then give me the longer one.”
I reach beneath the counter and pull the access token from its hidden slot. The little black rectangle rests in my palm, scuffed at the edges from years of being ignored until emergencies. “I don’t care if I die out there.”
Loklo’s face changes before he can hide it. The anger stays, but worry moves under it, old and familiar.
“That is not helping your case,” he says.
“I didn’t say I want to die.”
“You understand how thin that distinction sounds from here?”
“I said I don’t care if it happens.” I close my hand around the token and feel its hard edges press into my palm. “There’s a difference.”
Loklo steps closer, his voice dropping to something rougher. “Not to the people left cleaning up after you.”
I look at him then.
For once, he does not dress it in a joke. His expressive face is bare of the usual clever nonsense, and that makes him harder to answer. Loklo has been with me long enough to know the shape of my silence. He has seen me come back from fights with blood in my teeth and nothing behind my eyes. He has heard me laugh too loudly when someone mentions the war. He knows the bar is not peace. It is merely a place where I have managed to stop moving.
“This mission feels real,” I say.
Loklo’s shoulders ease down a fraction, not from relief but from recognition. “Dux.”
I hate the way he says my name there. Like he has found the wound and would rather not press, but will if he must.
I continue before he can. “Not safe. Not smart. Not noble. Real. She is walking into hell because someone she loves may still be breathing in it. That is stupid, maybe, but it is not empty.”
“And you want to be near that?”
“I want to be useful to it.”
Loklo studies me for a long moment, then laughs once under his breath. “That is the worst thing you have ever said to me, and I once heard you tell a customs officer that his mother looked like contraband.”
“She did.”
“She had a thyroid condition.”
“Then the contraband had nuance.”
Loklo points at me, but his hand shakes faintly. “Do not make me laugh while I am trying to be angry. It is manipulative.”
“I’m not manipulating you.”
“You exist loudly. That counts.”
I toss him the token.
