Deputy Officer Iklix Varn (Human)

On the fourth day there was someone at the plant.

The hatch had its number and nothing else, and it sat where it had sat on the first day, between a door with a name on it and a door with a plant outside it, and for three days Varn had come along the ring at the hour the shift changed and found the corridor doing what the corridor did, which was not look. On the fourth day a person about Varn's own age was crouched at the plant with a watering can, and looked up, and said, "You're the hatch."

Varn said, "Deputy Officer Varn."

"I know." He pointed, not quite at the tab, at the place on his own collar where a tab would go. "I looked it up. Three bars." He had the kind of face that had been about to say something else and had decided against it, and the can was full, and the plant did not look as though it needed the whole can. "Sorry. I'll get out of your way."

He did not entirely get out of the way. Varn went through the hatch and stood one step further from the desk than there was any reason to stand, and the six lights held, and the shift was the shift, and at the end of it Varn wrote what happened and Smith initialled it, and when Varn came out he was gone and the plant was wet.

On the fifth day he was there again.

The Academy teaches a Deputy to read a room for who in it has noticed you, and it teaches this early and well, because most of the rooms a Ranger walks into have somebody in them who has, and it matters which one. What it does not teach is what to do when the room is a corridor and the somebody is one person with a watering can. Varn had three readings and went through them on the way to the hatch. It was coincidence: a plant, a schedule, an hour that happened to be the hour. It was not coincidence, and somebody on the ring wanted to know when the Corps came and went, which was the kind of thing an intake file said note about. Or it was the third thing, which Varn was slowest to name, because naming it meant admitting it had a shape: that on a side of the ring where nobody looked at the hatch, one person had looked, and looked up the tab, and was here at the hour with a full can, and that the reason for that might be the tab. A joke about it. A courtesy that was a way of saying three bars, behind a door nobody opens.

He said, "What's behind it?"

Varn said what could be supported. "A watch."

"What does it watch?"

"It doesn't."

He laughed. It was not a long laugh and there was nothing in it that Varn could have written down, and it landed somewhere Varn could not see, and Varn did the thing a Deputy does when a Deputy does not know where they stand, which was take one step back. Not far. One. The honest step, the one a Deputy stands from a desk.

He stopped laughing. Something in his face closed the way a hatch closes, without a sound, and he said, "Right. Sorry, Deputy," and the word had changed shape between the two times he had used it, and he picked up the can, which was still nearly full, and went in at the door with the plant outside it.

Varn went through the hatch. The six lights were the colour they were. Smith looked up and said, "Varn," as a fact, and Varn stood one step too far from the desk and could not have said, if the log had asked, why the shift felt as though it had one line too many in it.