Interlude II

Something is wrong on the ship tonight, in the good way — feet moving fast, voices pitched high, the whole vessel humming with a kind of attention it doesn't usually spend on anything, and she moves through the middle of it unbothered, because urgency in the tall ones has never once, in her experience, had anything to do with her.

She goes where she always goes when the ship gets like this. Down, and back, to the bench that hums, to the small dead thing with the crack in its side that nobody has touched in three weeks and everybody stopped looking at even longer ago than that — the first one, the one that was wrong before any of the rest of it was wrong, before the warm box, before the deep place, before any of it had a shape a body could sit on.

She sits on it now, the way she sat on it the very first day, and something under her paw — loose, forgotten, a connector nobody re-seated after they decided the thing wasn't worth the trouble — shifts, just slightly, just enough.

She does not notice this as anything. It is only a thing that moved because she was sitting on it, the way things always move when she sits on them, and she settles, and closes her eyes, and does not think about it again.

Somewhere above her, the ship keeps humming with its good, urgent noise, and none of it is any of her business at all.