Alteea was mid-sentence about something else entirely when Kori set the reader on her desk.
They were high in the Heart, in the cluttered office Alteea always said was temporary – but had occupied for nine years. Alteea had been talking in her headset since Kori walked in — about the Council, about a budget, about a senator whose name she pronounced like a disease — with a pastry bag in one hand and her boots up on a chair. She was gesturing with the bag when her eyes landed on the cloth-wrapped shape Kori unwrapped onto the desk.
The boots came down off the chair.
She stood slowly, leaned over the desk, and looked at the warped reader for a long moment without touching it. The lamplight reflected in the metal's grain the way it always did, oily, organic and wrong. Kori watched every trace of the morning's theatre drain out of Alteea's face and something older and much more careful take its place.
