The city moved in patterns Flerat saw from the outside.
She kept her hands loose at her sides as she walked.
The thief worked the outer stalls. Male, compact, mid-twenties. Left-handed. His coat stayed open on that side. He lifted a comm unit from a vendor’s tray without breaking stride. Clean work. She noted him. Not her jurisdiction. Not her world anymore.
She kept walking.
The credentials office did not open until morning. Hours to burn. She bought a flatcake from a woman who wrapped it in paper without looking at her, then ate it standing at the corner of Vaanatan and the transit corridor, watching faces intent on where they were going.
She found the man at the third pillar in forty seconds.
He stood two body-lengths behind a woman in a gray coat. He adjusted when she adjusted, stopped when she stopped. The woman studied printed fabrics in a window display. Her shoulders were easy. She did not know.
Flerat folded the flatcake paper and put it in her pocket.
She fell in behind him.
He followed the woman two more blocks. She cut down a maintenance alley alongside the transit hub, a shortcut. He saw the gap in foot traffic. His right hand moved to his belt.
Flerat closed the distance.
She took his wrist before he raised it, turned it back and down, and put him against the wall with her forearm across his shoulders. Quiet. He grunted.
“Walk away,” she said.
He walked.
The woman in the gray coat never turned around. She came out the other end of the alley, crossed the transit square, and disappeared into the crowd. Flerat stood at the alley mouth and watched her go.
She did not need to know where the woman went.
In the morning, the credentials request took an hour. Then another day to kill.
By midday she covered the eastern quarter of Chernise. She did not know the street names. She did not need to. She grew up in the southern farmlands, far from city life, but none of this was new. She came back every five years, when her credentials came due. The renewal cycle ran on its own clock. She ran on the ship’s.
Amaresh still lived in the southern farmlands.
Flerat knew this from the yearly message. Teacher. Married. Two children whose names she knew and whose voices she never heard. In the last photo, two years old now, the youngest was three months, wrapped in pale green. Amaresh’s face tilted down toward the baby, an expression Flerat recognized and never wore.
She wrote back, Good. You look well. New year coming.
Amaresh replied, Come home sometime. I mean it.
Flerat did not answer that one.
She found a bar near the credentials district, quiet in the middle of the day, and sat at the far end with her back to the wall and a view of both doors. The house drink was local, Cherndan grain, slightly sweet. It smelled like her parents’ kitchen at the holidays. She never liked it.
She ordered it anyway.
When she was seventeen, her father found her GP application papers. He spread them on the kitchen table and waited. He never raised his voice. He never needed to. She told him she was testing for entry. He picked up the papers, squared them against the table edge, and put them back in the folder.
Your mother will want to know, he said.
Her mother wanted a wedding.
Flerat finished the drink and set the glass down.
She was not angry about any of it. Not for years. They had their logic. She had hers. She knew it at seventeen at that table, and she knew it ten years later at this bar with her back to the wall.
What she did not know was whether Amaresh’s children were home from school yet.
A foolish thing to wonder. She paid and left.
She spent the afternoon on the upper transit walkways, which ran the length of the city at the fourth-floor level and gave a clean sightline over the market rooftops. Chernise spread south toward the water. Pale buildings. Transit cables. The GP recruitment center on Strandan, where she walked in at eighteen with two changes of clothes and no plans to return.
She took out her comm and wrote to Amaresh. In the city for credentials. New year soon. Nothing that opened a door she could not close before the eighth hour tomorrow, when she picked them up.
Amaresh would answer in twenty minutes. She always did. She would ask how long Flerat was staying, whether she wanted to come for dinner. The children would want to meet her. Flerat would say no.
She did not send the message.
The sun set over the water. The city changed registers, quieter and colder. She went back to the transit lodgings near the credentials district and sat on the bed with her boots on and her back against the wall.