Field Officer Zoe Smith (Human)

The hatch had been on the latch, as it was most days, and the corridor had said its piece in about forty seconds, which was longer than the two of them had managed on either of the earlier days and shorter than either of them would have guessed.

She had heard the first line and known the can was gone before she saw that it was, because I know that is not a sentence a person says over a full can. He had come back to correct something, and had been honest enough not to know what, and had brought the only thing he was sure of, which was that the earlier thing had not been true. She had watched fourteen Deputies learn to do that and it had taken most of them longer than four days.

Her Deputy had read the hands first. That was the log, working. Then the step had not happened, and she had waited for the other one — the step forward, the over-correction, the Deputy who has understood that a step said something and now wants it to say the opposite — and that had not happened either. Varn had stood exactly where Varn stood and asked a name. It was the least a person could do in that corridor and the first true thing anyone had said in it that was not about a plant, and she noted it, because the small things were what the assessments were made of, and this was one.

She did not note that the desk step had not moved. Varn had come through the hatch and stood one step too far from it, as on the first day. The corridor step and the desk step were not the same step, whatever they looked like from outside, and she had known Deputies who moved one and never the other, in both directions. The ones she remembered moved the desk one on their own, and not soon.

Not yet.