Deafman Glance

“Nothing in life is free, nothing in life is free. Not a home, not a friend, not a joy in the end comes without a price for me…”

-from “Poor Traveler’s Burden”, traditional spacer song

Yan's arrival back in Yora, the Imperial Center, was completely mundane, if lonely. She was quite familiar with the city, since the Academy was positioned right outside the city lines, but it brought her a weird feeling of homesickness to be hauling her luggage to a new apartment rather than to her old Academy quarters. Before she had left for the Iron Dreams, Yan had all her belongings packed and shipped to the new address provided to her by one of First Sandreas's assistants, an official residence near government buildings in the Imperial Center. Yan now made her way there, dressed in her short red cape and black cassock.

She took a hired car from the airport, rather than wanting to deal with her luggage on the bus, which brought her directly to her new apartment. She had never seen it before, and she was fairly unimpressed by the sight. It was a standard brick building that looked to be less than thirty or so years old, as many buildings in Imperial Center were. Its plain appearance belied the amount of security that it contained. As Yan walked in, she could see cameras, and an armed guard at a security desk inside the clean and brightly lit front lobby. Elevators lined the back walls, and they seemed to only be accessible with security keys, which Yan did not possess. Yan had been given the message that the person at the desk would have her keys.

"Hello," Yan said to the security guard, "I'm Yan BarCarran- I'm moving in to suite 501. I was told that you were holding my keys?"

The man nodded at her. "Identification?" He asked.

Obediently, Yan pulled out her ID and handed it over, which the guard checked against both her face and his computer.

"Everything appears to be in order." He handed her ID back, and unlocked a drawer behind the desk. From the drawer, he pulled out a fob, which he handed to Yan.

"This will get you into the elevator and up to your apartment. Your door has been outfitted with a security lock. This will allow you to set its entry conditions when you open it the first time. Are you familiar with how to do that?"

Yan assumed he meant it was locks like the Academy had, so she nodded.

"All the packages that were mailed to your rooms should be inside. If you have any concerns about their security, please don't hesitate to contact the front desk- just press the star button on the intercom three times."

Yan nodded again. "Can I let guests in?"

"If you have guests who arrive on their own, they will need to report to the front desk, and we will com you to allow them up. Any guests that personally accompany you will be let in, of course."

"Thank you," Yan said, then asked "What's your name, by the way?"

"Jeff Denson," the man said. "I'm here most weekdays. Don't hesitate to call if you need anything."

"Thank you, Mr. Denson," Yan said.

"Not a problem, Miss BarCarran."

Yan picked up her luggage and trundled over to the elevators. She slapped the fob against the card reader, and the elevator door opened smoothly. She entered. Yan noticed that there were no buttons other than the emergency call, stop, and door open/close buttons. She supposed that the elevators would only take people to the floor their apartment was on. There was also a camera embedded into the wall above the elevator door. Yan had no doubt that every public area of this building was under constant surveillance. It was a little unnerving.

The elevator traveled swiftly upwards to the fifth floor, and deposited Yan in a carpeted hallway. There were only three doors in the hallway, marked 501, 502, and 503. Yan was surprised. Since the building was not particularly small, Yan had figured that there would be plenty of rooms on every floor. Maybe suddenly being a top government official meant spacious living conditions. Yan swiped her fob against the security reader on the wall next to her door. A light on it lit up green, and the small screen on it scrolled past text that read "Submit power for future authentication." Yan put her hand on the reader and let a trickle of her power flow out into it. The screen changed to text that read "ACCEPTED."

The lock on her door unlocked with an audible click, and Yan turned the handle to open it. She stepped into the dark room and fumbled around on the wall for the lightswitch, finally finding it and turning it on.

Her suite was spacious. She had stepped into the living room area, and there were two large couches surrounding a coffee table and facing a screen on one wall to her right, and an open kitchen on her left. There were doors heading off into what Yan presumed to be a bedroom and bathroom off of the living room, and a large, curtained window on the opposite wall from the door. A stack of boxes containing all of Yan's things from her Academy residence were neatly piled in the middle of the living area.

The walls of the rooms were painted a pleasant light blue, and the floor was carpeted. The kitchen, which Yan walked over to, had a tiled floor and a large table with several chairs. There were cupboards, which Yan found to be full of dishes, pots, and pans when she opened them. The stove, fridge, dishwasher, and other appliances were all gleaming and new. A door at the end of the kitchen, which Yan had assumed to just be a closet, opened to reveal a long pantry, with a washer and dryer at the end.

It was a much larger living situation than Yan had ever had, and she felt somewhat weird about taking out a glass and getting herself a drink of water from the sink. It was hard to believe that this, even if it wasn't one hundred percent "hers", was at least the place that she would be living. No matter how comfortable her Academy housing had been, this was so much more... Yan couldn't quite find the right word to express it. Adult? Impressive? Expensive? Just plain large? Maybe it was normal for other people, but Yan had only the tight family quarters of the Iron Dreams and student housing to compare it to. Having a kitchen and all its amenities to herself had been a luxury that Yan had never even considered before.

Yan finished drinking her glass of water, and set the cup down in the sink. She ran her fingers over the countertops as she walked out of the kitchen area to investigate the rest of the apartment. She had correctly identified the door that led to the bathroom, and found it to be a moderately sized room with a gleaming shower and tub. Yan had never lived in a place with a tub, since her bathing arrangement on the Iron Dreams was a communal shower in the grav section of the ship, and Academy housing only provided the tiniest stall for showering. It was a tempting thought to just take a bath right then, but Yan decided that she should at the very least unpack her clothes and toiletries first, so she wouldn't have to do that dripping wet and naked at the end of her bath.

She took a moment to glance at herself in the mirror. Her face still had a bit of the puffy look that a month in space and then prolonged and tiring travel would give a person, but aside from that she decided she looked almost fine. Her hair had grown out too much; she would have to cut it. Yan sighed, and filed that thought away as an issue for future Yan to deal with. She could stand to have too long hair for a little bit longer.

The next room in the apartment was the bedroom, which Yan was grateful to find contained a bed, complete with bare mattress. Unfortunately, the bed was much larger than the bedsheets that she had from her bed at the Academy. She made a mental note to order some new bedsheets, but she would survive with a sleeping bag until they arrived.

The bed was the main feature of the room, but there was a large, wall mounted mirror, and an equally large window that faced the same direction as the one in the living room. It was also curtained with thick fabric drapes like the one in the other room had been. A closet and chest of drawers made up the other wall.

Yan thought for a minute about the floor plan of the apartment. The size of the bathroom compared to the bedroom didn't quite match up. Though the bathroom was fairly large, it was nowhere near the width of the entire bedroom. Though there could have been just internal mechanisms of the building in the empty space, Yan had a hunch that there was something else going on. She opened the door of the closet and felt around on the back wall. It seemed like perfectly normal wood paneling to the touch. Still, figuring she'd try one more thing, Yan stretched out a tendril of her power to investigate the composition of the closet, or at least to get a mental picture of what was in the "missing" space.

Surprisingly, as soon as her power drifted past the wooden panels on the back of the closet, the whole back wall of the closet moved back and to the side, revealing a hidden room. Yan couldn't contain a grin. Despite the alarming implications of having a hidden room in her apartment, such as the apparent necessity of one, it still felt as though she had stepped directly into an exciting children's novel, where every wall or door could be hiding a secret behind it.

The room was a little bit larger than the bathroom, and did seem to take up the entirety of the "missing" space in the apartment. There was a desk at the far end of the room, several screens on the walls, and plenty of storage spaces for important items or documents. Yan made a mental note of the fact that the room seemed to have no ventilation, unlike the rest of the apartment. She supposed this probably doubled as a panic room, though she desperately hoped that wouldn't be necessary.

Though the room was interesting in concept, it was mostly empty. Yan stepped out, back through her closet into her bedroom. To close the room back up, she tried pushing her power through the door again. It closed smoothly, leaving no trace that there was any sort of door there. Slick.

Yan wandered back out into the living room area. Unfortunately, the time had come that she should unpack all of her belongings. She halfheartedly kicked a box with her foot, trying to remember if she had packed using any particular system. Knowing herself, she decided she probably hadn't. Just as she was kneeling down to open the first box, she heard a knocking at the door.

Yan jumped, completely startled by the sound. She had no idea who was knocking. Cautiously, she stretched out a line of power towards the other side of the door. There was a somewhat familiar presence there: someone she didn't recognize immediately by feel, but who she felt like she had seen before. Noticing her probing, the other person reached out a bit of their own power, in a slow and deliberately non-threatening way. This was enough to get Yan to walk over to the door and look out the peephole.

Sid, one of the other Academy students who had interviewed with First Sandreas, was on the other side of the door.

"Let me in," he signed at the peephole.

Obligingly, Yan opened the door. He immediately came in, practically bouncing past her and grinning.

Sid looked much the same as he had when Yan had last seen him at the Academy. He was still bald, wearing massive glasses that Yan still thought weren't actually necessary to see, still with the same long nose, bright blue eyes, and vicious smile.

"You don't know how bored I've been this week," he signed at her, going almost too quickly for Yan to follow. "No one here, nothing to do."

"Nice to see you," Yan signed back. Despite practicing sign whenever she could aboard the Iron Dreams in anticipation of working with Sid, her conversational skills remained somewhat rusty. Sign aboard ships was mainly used for technical or trade vocabulary, and only the bare minimum of conversation. She had picked up some real vocabulary through extensive watching of practice videos the Iron Dreams had, but that was no substitute for a real person.

"Have a good summer?" Yan asked.

"It was ok. Visited family, boring," Sid closed his eyes as he signed and mimed falling asleep. "You?"

"Same," Yan started, then signed the next part confidently, since it involved fairly common ship vocabulary, "Worked bridge navigation shift on the Iron Dreams, my family's ship."

"Cool." Sid flopped down onto one of Yan's couches and leaned over the back of it to look at her.

"How did you know I was here?" Yan asked.

"Saw you on the cameras. You found your room, right?"

Yan nodded at his question. She didn't immediately recognize the sign for camera, but figured it out from the little context there was, and the fact that the sign involved holding the first letter of the word up to the eye. "Cameras in here?" She asked nervously, pointing in a quick circle around the room.

"No, downstairs. You can see on the screens in the room," Sid explained.

"This is a guarded place," Yan remarked.

"You surprised?" Sid raised one eyebrow.

Yan shrugged in response. "I don't know."

"Welcome to the club of not knowing," Sid signed.

"Is the other girl," Yan fingerspelled her name, "Kino, here?"

"Tomorrow, I think," Sid said. He shrugged, indicating his disdain for her whereabouts.

"You don't like her?" Yan asked.

"She doesn't sign, so talking with her is boring." He shrugged again.

"Sorry if this is rude," Yan started, "But how did you go to class at the..." She had to fingerspell the next word, "Academy?"

"The sign is this," He steepled his hands together and then opened them like a book. Sid grinned again and took off his glasses. He tossed them at her, and Yan easily caught them out of the air.

"Wear them," Sid signed.

Yan obliged, slipping the glasses onto her face. They were somewhat heavier than she expected, but she had never worn glasses before, so she really had no frame of reference. It did confirm her suspicion that the glasses were not actually for seeing- since the world looked no different with them on as off.

Out loud, Sid spoke, in a deeper voice than Yan had expected. "See, I can speak and understand, but it's a pain." He had an odd, monotone sound to him, but his pronunciation was fine.

As Sid said this, his words appeared as text along the bottom of Yan's vision, subtitles projected onto the glasses lens. It was an odd feeling, and Yan could imagine it would get unpleasant if more than one person was talking at once.

"Interesting," Yan signed, then took off the glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose where they had been sitting. "Do they hear other languages? Or just New Imperial?" Yan didn't know the word for 'translate' so she used the word for 'hear' and hoped it would suffice. She walked over and handed the glasses to Sid, who slid them on his face.

"New and Old Imperial, but it doesn’t matter if they did more since I can't speak any other than New," Sid signed back. "Sign is easier." He shrugged once more.

"Did you come here because you were bored, or did you want to do something?"

"Bored, but we can do something," Sid replied.

"What do you want to do?" Yan asked.

Sid shrugged, which seemed to be his reply to most things. "I don't know anything about you, you need to give a thing to do." Yan signed, purposely rolling her eyes at him.

"We're friends now. What do you do with friends?" Sid asked.

"We're friends now?" Yan raised her eyebrows as high as they could go. "This is our second talk."

"If we're not friends, we need to get to be friends quickly. I think we will have a lot of time together."

"If you say so." Yan nudged a box that was sitting at her feet. "I don't have any things to do.” She paused, considered how to simplify the sentence she wanted to communicate in sign. “I was going to move my things."

"Cool," Sid signed, watching her with interest. "Fun."

"Not fun. Are you just going to watch?" Yan made a skeptical face.

"Sure." Sid had the same grin that Yan was sure she would soon come to find infuriating.

"Ugh." Yan said out loud. "Fine," she signed. "If I do all the work, this is the plan." She hit her wrists together exaggeratedly hard on 'work', but it wasn't malicious. "I put on a movie, I work, then we eat dinner?"

"Good plan." Sid said, still smiling. "What movie?"

"You are the worst." Yan walked over to her backpack that she had deposited near her other luggage. She fished around in the smallest pocket for a small media drive, which she tossed at Sid. Her throw went wide, but he used the power to summon it back over to himself.

"There's movies on there. Pick one you want, they're all good," Yan signed.

Obligingly, Sid got up and plugged the drive into the wall screen. As Yan got started unpacking her belongings from boxes, Sid scrolled through the files on the drive to find a movie that he wanted to watch. Eventually, he settled on an animated fantasy film about a race of people living underground waging war against giant evil bugs. It was a good movie with an impressive art style that Yan had been scared of as a kid, but liked as an adult.

Sid half watched the movie and its subtitles and half watched Yan as she sorted her belongings into piles. She had one pile for the living room, one pile for the kitchen, one pile for the bedroom, et cetera. Once all her boxes had been sorted, she started on actually putting things away. Posters and pictures were attached to the bare walls, kincknacks found their way to the shelves underneath the windows, clothes were folded or hung and put away, and toiletries were placed in their rightful spots in the bathroom. Yan wasn't sure if she had surprisingly much or surprisingly little stuff to put away. After all, she had been living mainly out of a small dorm room that could only fit so much, but distributing her possessions around her new home made the place feel more lived in already.

One of the last things to come out of storage was her final project from the Academy. She had "turned it off", so to speak, while it was in storage, suspending all the programming that kept the fish moving around. Now that she had a permanent residence, she could revive it.

She plopped down next to Sid on the couch and summoned the large sphere over to her lap. The surface of the sphere was an opaque white, and the whole thing was quite heavy and large. Sid looked at it curiously, but didn't ask her anything about it. She reached over for the remote for the screen and muted the movie, not that it would matter to Sid.

Yan closed her eyes and breathed deeply for a minute, placing her hands on the sides of the glass sphere. It was cool to the touch. She send out her power through her hands into the bowl. It had been a while since she had last worked on it, and looking back at the threads of power that wound and wove through the work, she noticed things that were messy and haphazard, careless work from when she was in a rush to finish it. Surrounding the whole thing was the few lines that kept it frozen in stasis. Yan brushed those lightly away, and she could feel, rather than see, the surface of the sphere becoming clear and the fish and plants inside stir to "life". That was easy enough, but since she was here, she might as well fix some of the more egregious tangled bits of power.

For a while, Yan worked. She redirected commands through the right parts of the power system. The whole thing was designed to be modular and easily changed, with different main components that handled very low level functions, and branching smaller ones with higher level properties. When she had been working on it the first time, though, Yan had hard coded in a few things that were meant to be more adaptable, mainly because of time constraints. If anyone looked too closely, there would be parts of the power structure that appeared completely tacked on and inelegant. She didn't have the time or patience to fix it all tonight, but she could at least take care of a little bit of it.

As she worked, Yan could feel Sid watching her. His attention was split between the movie and what she was doing, but after a while, his whole attention focused on her. Yan assumed this was because the movie had ended. Sid reached out a tiny bit of his own power to touch the sphere and investigate it. Yan could feel a curiosity towards it, but he didn't make any attempt to alter the sphere, for which Yan was grateful. This was hers, and he was welcome to observe, but not to change. He didn't seem that interested in its inner workings, anyway. Maybe he wasn't as into biology as Yan was.

After a while, she decided she had had enough, and withdrew her focus from the sphere. When she opened her eyes, it was its familiar, shiny and clear self, with the fish swimming about inside of it as peacefully as ever. She floated the heavy object to sit on the coffee table.

"Nice," Sid signed. "Your project?"

Yan nodded. "It was for the..." she gave up searching for the word and fingerspelled, "xenobio team, but I got First Sandreas instead."

"Xenobiology," Sid fingerspelled, then made the signs for space and life up near his forehead, to indicate knowledge.

"Thanks." Yan tried to commit the word to memory. "What was your project?

Sid's now familiar grin made an appearance once again. "Can I show you?" Sid asked, then reached out to tap her on the head. Yan blinked in surprise as he did that, but shrugged and nodded her assent.

"How do you..." She started, realized she didn't know the word for meditate, the sighed. Usually two people would sync up by listening to the same thing, and that was why worship was sung, but since Sid was deaf that obviously wasn't what he did.

"Like this," he signed. He held up his hands in front of himself, then started clapping out a children's rhythm game. Clap once, left hand reaches right, clap again, right hand reaches left. Yan got the gist almost immediately and joined in, clapping their hands together. After a few seconds of the mindless rhythm, they both closed their eyes and sank down into the trance.

This was obviously the first time Yan had ever been with Sid like this, and it was a fairly rare occasion that she meditated alone with anyone who wasn't one of her close friends at the Academy. As always, it was a weirdly intimate feeling, being directly connected to another person's mind, but in such a connection, at least between relative strangers, it was beneficial to keep the shared mind space as sterile as possible.

Yan "heard" Sid speak in her mind, using her own mental voice, sending her a complete, formed thought. "The sign for this is..." And then there was a picture in her mind of the sign for meditate and the ghost sensation of what making the sign would feel like.

She signaled her gratitude to him. "Show me your project?" She asked. Though she asked this thought in her own mental voice, she knew that he would receive it as his own, which luckily meant that for the rest of the time they were meditating, she at least didn't have to worry about remembering a ton of signs she didn't know. This feeling of relief accidentally carried along with her intentional thought, and she caught an echo of Sid's amusement.

But then he sent her the mental diagram he had of his own project. In his mind it was towering, and though it was missing the physicality of the real thing, Sid's image and feeling of it was so clear it made Yan shiver. A statue lifted a sword up above its head, and Yan imagined how it would feel both to swing the sword and have the sword come down upon her. Since this was essentially Sid's feelings and thoughts about his project, she couldn't quite decide which feeling was more important to him, but she could definitely tell which one the audience of the project was meant to feel. She supposed she was grateful that she was getting this, not less intense, but slightly different perspective on it, rather than seeing the project in person.

After the first wave of feelings had had a moment to settle in, Yan was able to gently poke around and inspect how the thing was made. The actual construction of it was fairly simple. Base metals sourced from somewhere and just manipulated to be in the correct form, a shining face of gold, wrought in the same fashion. She knew that the whole thing could move, the power written into it and shaping it clearly said that it could, but it didn't. The whole thing lacked any sort of Reason, or Motivation, to move and swing the sword. This was interesting. She made a mental note to ask Sid about it after she finished investigating.

The sensation that the statue was producing was the more interesting part. It actively projected a feeling of fear, though Yan was avoiding the brunt of it based on the fact that the statue was not currently real. She had never seen anything quite like it before, an object that actively reached out to impact someone's mental state. How common or easy to make was this? What other applications could this have? How did Sid do it? The questions tumbled around in her head for a moment.

As far as how it worked, Yan could see at least a little bit. She noticed that the statue was designed in such a way that most people would process the image of it in the same way. The eyes would travel up the statue because it was so tall, notice the sword, and be drawn in by the gleaming gold face. All the lines of the statue traveled in the same direction. It was an impressive visual, and well composed. This allowed the viewer of the statue to be at least a little bit "aligned" mentally with Sid's expectations. It was a weird twisting of the meditation mechanic, where focusing on the same thing would allow two sensitive people to fall into a shared space. Sid was able to capture a person's attention, and with that captured, feed back an emotional response. Yan guessed that because of their practice with meditation and falling into a shared thought space, sensitive people would be more affected by the feeling of fear. The effect of drawing a person in wasn't strong enough to plant an actual thought, just magnify an emotional response that was already brought about by the vision of the statue itself.

Still, the project had some troubling implications. Could this be used to subtly manipulate people? Yan wondered about a block of text written on a wall, with these same lines of power behind it. Most people read text instinctively, without conscious thought, and there is only one way to read text, not like looking at a piece of art where the artist has only some control. Would this effect become more powerful then?

Yan could feel Sid listening in on these thoughts, since she wasn't doing much to hide them. He sent back the knowledge that he had tried this with text, as a smaller scale experiment, but there was no other feeling attached to that knowledge, it was just a statement of facts.

"Dangerous?" Yan asked.

She felt, rather than saw, Sid's mental shrug. A few thoughts trickled over to her, primarily that he felt that the effect was too nonspecific and obvious to be useful or effective. A generalized sense of fear or any other emotion could be created much more easily than wasting the limited resources of sensitives on this. Besides, at least in the case of the statue, it was obvious where the feeling was coming from, and it would be fairly easy to destroy any such 'projector'.

Yan was grateful to Sid's frank practicality. Still, she couldn't help the nagging fear that...She felt Sid laugh and withdraw the diagram from her mind. The feeling subsided, and Yan mentally laughed a little too.

"Maybe it's not as obvious as you hope," Yan mentally commented. "Thanks for showing me."

Yan made clear her intentions of withdrawing from the shared meditation space, and then did so, blinking as she opened her eyes. They were still clapping, but as she came back into full awareness of her body, she felt her arms get a little tired. She dropped them. Sid smiled at her when he opened his eyes.

"Like it?" He signed.

Now it was Yan's turn to shrug. "Very interesting, scary. Who did you make it for?"

"I don't know. Military I guess." He waved his hands noncommittally. "Wasn't important, I'd be happy anywhere."

"Happy to be with First Sandreas?" Yan asked.

Sid nodded. "You?"

"Don't know. Feels like something I had to do."

Sid stared at her expressionless for a second, as if looking to see if she was telling the truth, then changed the subject. "What should we get for dinner?"

"Delivery?" Yan asked.

"Yeah, unless you want to go out," Sid said. "What type?"

"Pizza?" Yan asked.

Sid nodded his assent. "I like..." Yan, being unfamiliar with the words for pizza toppings, waved her hands to stop him.

"Spell it, please."

"You have the worst sign. P-e-p-p-e-r, m-u-s-h-r-o-o-m." He made the signs for the words again, and Yan made a mental note of more words to try to remember.

"Split a big?" Yan asked. Sid nodded.

"You call." Sid signed. Yan rolled her eyes at that, obviously she would be the one calling, but pulled out her phone anyway. She looked up the nearest pizza place that would deliver and made the call, ordering one large pizza with peppers and mushrooms. It would be about twenty minutes before the pizza could be delivered, so they continued to chat as they waited.

"Kino's coming tomorrow, and work is the next day, right?" Yan asked.

Sid nodded. "Exciting things."

"No idea what is going to happen," Yan said. If she knew the word for 'apprehensive', she probably would have used it instead of Sid's more enthusiastic 'exciting'.

"That's where the fun is," Sid said. "In the unknown."

Yan shook her head. "If you think that, things stop being fun when you know what you are doing."

"Yeah. That's why I'm happy to do new things," Sid said.

"We could have only small jobs," Yan cautioned.

"Don’t think so," Sid replied. "Sandreas doesn’t look mean."

"I do not understand Sandreas," Yan admitted. "He is strange."

"He has to be. A person with that much power has to have a real spirit."

"Do you have a real spirit?" Yan asked.

"Isn't it obvious?" Sid's grin was back in full force. He seemed to be a man who never stopped smiling, and Yan wasn't sure if it was going to end up being endearing or infuriating.

Yan rolled her eyes at him in response. "I don't know you or your real spirit."

"What do you want to know?" Sid asked.

"I have many questions," Yan signed.

"Ask away."

"First, why do you have no hair on your head?" Yan asked.

"I could ask you almost the same question," Sid replied, with an amused expression.

"Long hair is bad in space, so it is very short. Easy," Yan signed.

This was not completely the truth, but it was too much, both in terms of vocabulary and emotion, to go into the sad story of how when she became an orphan no one braided her hair like her mother once did, and it was more convenient to just cut it all off. Yan decided that if Sid asked about her mother she would tell, and then he could make his own deductions from there.

"Fair. I keep it down because my mother hates it, and I want to get..." Another word that Yan didn't recognize. Her blank look clued Sid in. "T-a-t-t-o-o." He graciously spelled it out for her.

"Why tattoos?" Yan used the new word.

"I want to look more powerful. It will be cool." Sid signed this with a look of utmost sincerity, and Yan laughed out loud.

"Good luck," she signed, entirely genuine.

"Any other questions?" Sid asked.

"Why do you do what your mother hates?" Yan asked.

"She likes to control me. I don't like to be controlled." Sid accompanied this with a shrug.

"What is your family like?" Yan asked.

"Lonely. Boring."

"Lonely?" Yan asked.

Sid mistook her question for her not understanding the sign. "L-o-n-e-l-y."

"Why lonely?"

"Not many other deaf people around. My parents don't go out a lot."

Yan nodded in understanding. "Any siblings?"

Sid nodded. "Two. My older brother is..." He made the sign for dirt with one hand and the sign for foot with the other, tapping his hands together above his heart. "And my younger sister is..." He made the sign for apple and circled it around his face.

"And you are..." Yan remembered the sign he had showed her the day they had originally met, making the sign for egg, the first letter of the word but with fingers opening rapidly outward when struck on something. In this case the thing was against his own head. Sid's grin showed teeth.

"That's me."

"Where are you from?" Yan asked.

"Next door. Galena." He fingerspelled the name of the planet for Yan, then gave the sign. Galena was, in a galactic sense, next door. One of the oldest colonized worlds, a core world that for a while was considered the seat of the Empire. Yan had never been on the planet, but the Iron Dreams had run a few mining cargoes to that region of space.

"What's it like?"

"It's a whole planet, lots of different pieces. I lived in a normal area. Farmland. Far away from other people."

"They speak New Imperial?"

"Some new, some old, but I didn't until I came to the Academy."

"Me too. My family is from Terlin, we still speak it on the ship." She fingerspelled the name of the planet.

"How many languages do you know?" Sid asked, curious.

"New Imperial, Old Imperial, my bad sign, and Terlin. Not many," Yan signed. "It was hard at the Academy, not knowing New Imperial. Had to learn fast."

Sid nodded. "I could read, and I had this," he gestured to his glasses. "But I had never learned to talk. My whole family is deaf, so." He shrugged. "Wasn’t important to teach me until I was stolen for the Academy."

"Stolen?" Yan asked.

"My family didn't have a choice. Yeah. Stolen. You don't feel that way?"

"My family was happy to have something to do with me," Yan laughed a little ruefully. "And it was good to have a powerful person come off the ship."

"Your family wanted you to leave? Were you a ..." Sid signed something that Yan didn't follow.

"Was I what?" Yan asked.

Sid made the signs again, more slowly. She saw the sign for animal, but still didn't understand the other one. Still, she figured it out from context.

"I wasn't bad. No one wanted to do work to keep me. My mother died when I was six, so I didn't have close family to live with."

"I'm sorry," Sid signed.

"Long time ago, not important now," Yan responded, then anxiously ran a hand over the back of her head.

"Still," Sid signed. Neither of them said anything for a moment.

"Do you have anything you like to do?" Yan asked abruptly, now slightly desperate to change the subject.

"I like to fix things, machines from my family's farm. Got started drawing by making diagrams of of machines. Read a lot," Sid said. "What about you?"

"Kids on a ship want to pilot the dogfighters and shuttles. I like flying. Watch movies. Studied biology and math. I learned meditation and I liked it." She was glad to have remembered the sign that Sid had taught her. "I'm boring." Yan laughed at herself.

"No," Sid signed emphatically, shaking his head. "You seem interesting."

"Why do you think that?" Yan asked.

"I've never met a spacer before. You're well traveled. You seem really smart. You're nice."

Yan raised an eyebrow at the last point.

"Really. You talk to me in sign even when you know I can speak and understand New Imperial. I come to your house and you entertain me. You will be my friend."

"That is silly. We know sign and you like it, so I try. We work together, it's good to know each other."

"The same could be said for you. You prefer to speak New Imperial, right?"

"I like to speak Terlin," Yan signed, again spelling out the name of her native language. "New Imperial is useful." She tried to make an expression of disdain on useful, so that Sid would know that he wasn’t imposing on her. It was true that New Imperial would be easier for Yan than sign, but she was trying to be polite.

Sid shrugged, but it was clear that he had not actually changed his mind about Yan's niceness.

"It's nice of you to be slow with me," Yan countered.

"If I was mean to people learning sign, I'd be sad and lonely," Sid said, looking as though he would like nothing better than to be mean to people who made no attempt to learn sign.

Yan briefly abandoned the conversation as she heard a doorbell sound chime.

"Pizza's here," she signed to Sid, who nodded.

Yan got up off the couch and walked over to the intercom to answer the call.

"Hello?" She asked.

"Hello, Ms. BarCarran, there is a delivery in the lobby, should I let it up for you?"

"Yes, thank you, Mr. Denson, I am expecting a pizza delivery."

"Enjoy your pizza, I'll send it right up."

Yan heard the click of the intercom turning off. While she waited for the elevator to bring the delivery up, Yan searched through her backpack for her charge card to pay. She found it just as the doorbell rang again. She peered through the peephole and saw the expected delivery robot waiting patiently outside the door. She opened the door and swiped her card on the robot's provided payment system, which caused a door on the front of the robot to open, revealing the expected boxed pizza. She pulled the pizza out and shut the robot's door, giving it a pat before it rolled away back towards the elevators.

Sid had walked over to the kitchen and was setting the table with plates from the cupboard. Yan set the pizza down on the table.

"I didn't buy anything to drink, I forgot," Yan signed, seeing that he was putting out glasses as well.

"Let me get something from my room." Sid put down the glass he was holding and practically bounced towards the door of Yan's apartment. Turning back around he signed, "Be right back!"

Yan sat down in one of the chairs around the table to wait for Sid to come back. To kill time, she investigated the pizza. It was just as expected, covered in peppers and mushrooms. Good stuff. She closed the box as she heard Sid pounding on her door. She went over to the door and let him in.

"You will break the door down," she signed. Sid was holding a bottle of wine in his hand, so didn't respond. He held it out to her and she took it.

"Housewarming gift," he signed.

Yan walked over to the table and put the bottle down. "Pizza and..." She gestured to the bottle, not knowing the word for wine. "Really?"

"I'm nothing if I'm not c-l-a-s-s-y," Sid replied, now anticipating at least some of the gaps in Yan's vocabulary.

"I thought you'd bring something else," Yan replied.

"I want to celebrate our new friendship." The word for celebrate was unfamiliar to Yan, but she mirrored it anyway.

"Let's celebrate then." Yan opened up a few of the drawers to look to see if there was a bottle opener. She couldn't find one, gave up, and simply used the power to pull the cork out of the bottle. She poured two glasses of wine. "Thanks," she signed when she had finished. "I didn't mean to be not thankful, I was just surprised."

Sid just smiled at her and took some pizza.

"You want to say the prayer? I don't know the signs," Yan said, then grabbed her own slices of pizza. Sid nodded.

Yan watched him intently as he signed the prayer. She recognized it as one of the standard food blessings, and from that recognition she tried to remember the specific signs for words she didn't know. It was getting to the point of information overload, and Yan didn't doubt that she would have to be told many of the words that she was learning again, but she had a good mind for languages, so it was interesting and worthwhile for her regardless.

"Blessed are you, Lord of all creation, whose untold works provide sustenance and beauty. May you bless this work of our human hands, and remind us that all the good things of this world come from and return to you, forever," Sid prayed.

Yan smiled as he finished. "Eat up," she signed. They both dug into the pizza. It was a decent pizza, nothing special, but pretty good anyway. They both had several slices, but there were several left over after they had finished, since it was quite a large pizza. They drank a good portion of the wine bottle, as well.

"You want the rest? For tomorrow?" Yan asked Sid, gesturing to the few leftover slices.

"No, you keep it. I have food in my apartment."

"I need to go buy food," Yan signed with a frown. "I don't know how."

"Really?"

"Always lived somewhere with a dining hall." Yan had no idea how to cook or grocery shop for anything more than snack food, and this was an unexpected problem. A sudden fear crossed her mind, that she would spend the rest of her life ordering takeout and never figuring out how to feed herself. Sid saw the look on her face and smiled broadly, but not maliciously.

"If you want, we can go buy food tomorrow. I'll show you what to buy."

"Thank you," Yan said sincerely. "That is good."

"Don't want you to be helpless as a baby," Sid said.

"I am, sadly."

Sid yawned, disrupting his usual crooked grin. Yan yawned back.

"Tired?" She asked. Sid nodded.

"I will see you in the morning," Sid said. "And we will go out and buy you some food."

"Good plan." The two stood up, and Yan walked him over to the door. "See you tomorrow," she said.

"Thank you for dinner," Sid said, stepping out into the hallway.

"Thank you for coming," Yan replied. Sid smiled and waved, walking back towards his own apartment. Yan closed the door.

She breathed a sigh of relief when he was gone. It wasn't as though he was an unpleasant person, in fact, Yan thought that he was quite interesting, but Sid certainly was intense, and Yan was tired. She walked back into the kitchen and started cleaning up the pizza. The remaining slices went into the fridge, along with the remaining wine. The dishes went into the dishwasher, but she couldn't run it because she didn't have any soap. Just another thing to buy at the grocery store tomorrow, she guessed.

Yan wandered over to the couch and flopped down onto it. She pulled out her phone and idly browsed the net for a while. She saw Harbin's pictures he posted of his new apartment, which she commented on.

> little boring for an architect, isn't it? :p

She didn't expect a response, since it was early in the morning in Harbin's part of the world.

Scrolling a little farther down, she saw that Genna had cross posted images of herself in a large group of people standing next to giant farming equipment. The caption was "Anthus colony team welcomes our newest member, Academy graduate Genna Zal!" Zooming in on the picture, Yan saw that Genna had a nauseous look on her face, and her artificial hand was jammed deeply into her pocket.

Yan sent her a message about the picture.

> you ok? farming stuff still rough?

A minute later Genna sent a response.

hey glad you're back from space

it's fine

big farm machines just make me nervous

how's your apprenticeship?

Yan responded

> haven't started yet, just got back

> coworker seems nice though

> did you have a good summer?

yeah, it was fine

I'm headed to bed, got work early tomorrow

> see ya

Yan closed the conversation with Genna, and then opened one with Sylva.

> hey

Yan waited with her eyes closed and her phone resting on her chest. After a few minutes, Sylva responded.

hey yourself

make it to Imperial Cntr ok?

> yeah

> ate pizza and drank wine

> feels weird to not be at the academyu

> hows home?

fine. family's pissed I didn't stay there for break

whatever. dont care

miss you mostly

> miss u too

> you driving to landis tomorrow?

yeah. long drive

cross country trip with my dad.

can't think of anything more fun

> at least you don't have to take a train with all your stuff

I guess.

just nervous or whatever about my apprenticeship

> same

> I get to grocery shop like a real adult tomorrow

> not just someone who buys junk food for fun

lol

good luck with that

please dont' get scurvy and die because you don't buy enough vegetables

> I lvoe vegtables

> I will buy so many

on the other hand, please don't buy so many vegetables that you get vegetable overload

keep your eyes the same size as yopur stomach

> ok

> I'll do my best

> I've gotta go to sleep soon

> ooh. gotta buy bedsheets at the store. almost forgot

you can't buy bedsheets at the grocery, but good luck on your bed quest

> lol

> thanks for the bedsheet advice

> though I do know where that thype of thing is sold

> I'm just telling you my to do list

> because I'm a little buzzed and v tired

haha

go to bed

> I will go to bed now

> goodnight Sylva

gud night

<3333

Yan shut off her phone and reluctantly clambered off the couch. She wandered into the bathroom. She saw the bathtub, and remembered that her original plan for the evening had been to take her first bath, possibly ever. Then she decided that she would probably prefer not to fall asleep in the tub, so it would have to wait for some other time. She brushed her teeth, washed her face, lamented her too long hair in the mirror, and cleaned herself up for bed.

In her room, she laid her sleeping bag out on the bed and changed out of her uniform and into her pajamas. She tossed her dirty clothes over into the corner, and made a mental note to buy a laundry basket when she bought bedsheets. Yan turned off the light.

In the dark, she walked over to the window and pulled the blinds back. The lights of the city were bright outside, keeping the sky lit despite the late hour. She couldn't see much of the skyline of the city, she wasn't high up enough, but she could see that there was a city, and a world outside of the room. It was a feeling she had missed while she was on the Iron Dreams. It was strange, the things that she only realized she missed when she had them again. Probably, part of it was because it was too stressful to truly contemplate the true realities of life on a ship all the time, and it was best to let all the knowledge of what was outside the walls and windows fade into a distant recognition, rather than a pressing thought.

Yan knelt down at the window to say her nightly prayer. She lingered there for a minute after she was finished, just breathing evenly and staring out into the distance. Eventually, she stood up and crawled into her sleeping bag.

She fell asleep right away, but her dreams were turbulent.