Page 36 of Red Scale Daddy
He catches it against his chest and looks down. His fingers close around it slowly.
“Full authority,” I say. “Accounts, supplier codes, locks, payroll, and the safe under the south floor panel.”
Loklo looks up sharply. “The one labeled plumbing?”
“Yes.”
“That is not plumbing?”
“It was plumbing-adjacent money.”
“You told me it was dangerous to open.”
“It is. It contains responsibility.”
Loklo rubs his thumb over the token. “You are giving me the bar.”
“I am leaving you in charge.”
“That is a prettier way of saying the same ugly thing.”
“Keep Venn’s people out. Pay Gressa on time or she waters down the station-quality whiskey with something that glows. Do not extend credit to anyone who says they are good for it. Anyone good for it never needs to say so. The left coolant line in the cellar sticks when the station changes thermal cycle; kick it twice, not three times.”
“Three times makes it worse,” Loklo says quietly.
“Good. You listen.”
“I listen when people I care about start making last requests.”
The silence that follows is thick enough to lean on.
I put one hand on the bar. The metal beneath my palm is dented, familiar, faintly sticky no matter how often Loklo threatens sanitation reforms. I should feel more. Maybe I do, but my feelings are old soldiers; they know how to crawl beneath smoke and keep quiet.
“I may come back,” I say.
Loklo’s mouth twists. “That may is doing heroic work.”
“It is the honest word.”
“I hate honest words. They stand around naked and make everyone uncomfortable.”
I grin despite myself. “Run the bar, Loklo.”
He looks around the room as if seeing it for the first time as something that might belong to him. “If you die, I am redecorating.”
“That is your grief plan?”
“It will be ugly and spiteful. You would hate it.”
“Then I have an incentive.”
Loklo breathes out slowly, and some of his anger leaves with it. “Good. Hate the curtains from a living body.”
I head for the stairs to my room. He follows, because of course he does. The upper hall smells like dust, overheated wiring, and the fried starch cakes the kitchen unit burns every fourth cycle no matter how it is programmed. My door sticks when I open it. It has always stuck. I never fixed it because some things are more comforting when they complain.
My room contains very little worth naming.
A duffel waits on the bed where I left it after returning from Roma’s ship. Clothes. Compact armor panels. A ship-safe sidearm. Two blades. Medpack. Old tags from the war that I do not wear and do not throw away. A data chip with music from men and women who are bones now, if anything was left of them at all.
