Noah Adeyemi (Human)

He left the can inside.

That was the decision, and it had taken him two days to make it, which was a long time for a decision about a watering can. The plant did not need water. It had not needed water on the fourth day or the fifth, and the Deputy had probably known that both times, because the Corps wrote things down and a person who wrote things down for a living would have noticed a full can going into a wet pot. So the can had been a lie, and a small one, and the kind everybody on the ring told every day, and it had still been the wrong thing to bring to that hatch. He did not know why he knew that. He knew it the way he knew a spoke car was about to stop.

So he came out at the hour with nothing in his hands and crouched at the plant anyway, because standing in the corridor with nothing in his hands was worse, and looked at the leaves as though he were checking them, which he was not, and waited for the hatch.

It was the word that had brought him back. Not the step — he had understood the step, or thought he had: the tab was a rank after all, on this side as well as the other, and he had been a resident talking to the Corps and had not known it. That had stung and then stopped stinging. What had not stopped was that he had said Deputy the second time the way his mother said it when a Ranger came through the Compact side on some business that was not hers, politely, to a uniform. He had made the tab into a rank with his own mouth, in the same breath as finding out it was one. He had been the one to do it. He wanted, without any clear idea of how, to un-say it.

The hatch opened. The Deputy came out and stopped, and he watched the Deputy's eyes go to his hands first and to his face second, and understood that the absence of the can had been read before he had, and that this was the order things were read in behind that hatch, and that he had, for once, brought the right thing.

He stood up. He said the true thing, because it was the only one he had brought.

"It doesn't need watering. I know that."