Chapter 5
The morning I left Meridian, I walked through Building 437 one last time. The east corridor floors were clean, as they had been every morning I had maintained them, and the equipment cage was locked, and the paper towel dispensers were full. I had left everything the way I had found it, which was the standard for any position, operational or otherwise.
Steel was in the corridor near the briefing room entrance. He saw me with my duffel and he did not say anything for a moment, and then he said my name, not Rebecca, which I had not told him was not my name, but he said it anyway, the name that was in my running registration and my maintenance logs and every piece of paper I had signed for fourteen months.
"Where are you going?" he said.
"New assignment," I said.
He looked at the duffel, then at me. The expression on his face was the one he had worn at the finish line, the one that was not embarrassment exactly but the specific look of a man who has revised a significant assumption and is still calibrating the size of what he got wrong.
"I owe you something," he said.
I stopped walking. I looked at him. I thought about the mop bucket and the princess and move it and careful with that and every casual dismissal over fourteen months, and I thought about the finish line and the dust rising from the pack and the silence that had followed.
"You don't owe me anything," I said.
He frowned. "I was wrong about you."
"Yes," I said. "You were."
"I just want to—"
"Commander." I shifted the duffel on my shoulder. "Being wrong about someone and then acknowledging it is the minimum. It's not a debt. It's just the floor."
I started walking.
"That's all I'm asking for," I said, without turning around. "Just start from the floor."
May you like
I heard him stand there in the corridor behind me as I walked toward the exit, and I did not look back, because the work was done and the door at the end of Building 437 opened onto the kind of morning that does not ask you to explain yourself, just to decide where you are going.
I had always been good at that part.
