Deputy Officer Iklix Varn (Human)

No can.

That was the first thing, and Varn read it before reading anything else, because a week of writing the log had done something to the order in which a Deputy noticed a corridor: what was there, what was not, what had changed since the last entry. On the fourth day a full can and a wet pot. On the fifth the same. On the sixth, coming off shift, the soil dark and the corridor empty, which the log had not needed and Varn had noted anyway. On the eighth, the person and no can, crouched at a plant he was not looking at.

Then he stood and said it did not need watering and he knew that, and Varn had a whole sentence of assessment ready about what that meant and did not say it, because the officer inside had spent a week declining to tell a Deputy what things meant and it had started, somewhere around the seventh day, to seem like the only honest way to stand in a corridor.

Varn said what could be supported. "It was watered on the sixth day."

"By my mother." He had gone a little red. "That's the day. Of the week, I mean — it fell on your sixth. I'm not — the can wasn't about the plant."

"No."

He waited, and Varn understood he was waiting for the step, and that if the step came he would say Deputy the other way again and go in, and that this was in Varn's hands and had been on the fifth day too, and Varn had not known it then. It was not a comfortable thing to know. The Academy had a great deal to say about reading a room for who had noticed you and nothing at all about what to do once you had noticed them back.

Varn did not step back. Varn did not step forward either, which would have been a different report and not a true one. Varn stood where Varn was, which was one step further from him than there was any reason to stand, and left it there, and said the thing the shape of the week had an empty place for.

"What's your name?"

Something in his face opened the way a hatch opens, without a sound. "Noah. Adeyemi. It's on the door, actually, on the inside." He said it too fast and then stopped. "You're Varn."

"Deputy Officer Varn."

"I know. I looked it up."

"I know," Varn said, and heard that it had come out almost as a laugh, and that he had heard that too, and that neither of them knew what to do about it, and that this was apparently allowed, because nothing in the corridor changed and nobody said Deputy the other way. He put his hands in his pockets, having nothing to hold. Varn went through the hatch. The six lights were the colour they were.

At the end of the shift Smith turned the log toward the Deputy and said, "Enter it," and Varn wrote the instruments, the hatch, the officers, and stopped, as Varn had stopped the day before over a story, and this time did not write the rest. The corridor was not the watch's. A resident had stood in it and said his name. It had happened, and somebody who was not there could not check it, and would not need to, and it was not the Corps' to keep.

Smith initialled it. She did not ask what the stop had been for.