The man who answers the door has no hair and a rather horrible-looking face, and the expression of someone who expects to be the worst surprise you've had all day and is already sorry about it.

Her eyes widen a little bit, but the smile does not falter. She manages to look without staring. Her parents may not have raised her well, but they raised her better than that. Besides, once you get used to interacting with really old people who've forgotten how to poop in toilets, there's a limit to how much more horrifying bodies can get.

"Hi! I hear you're having some problems with ants?"

He relaxes slightly at her relatively calm reaction.

"Yes," he says, "I think they're coming in through the ceiling."

She is a little concerned by this, but only before she thinks about the alternative. "Oh! OK, well, that's better than them coming through the floor, at this height. Can I come in?"

"Yes, of course."

He stands back to let her in. The apartment is spacious and pleasantly decorated, but a little cluttered; every available surface is piled with some combination of books and clockwork. Dust has begun to accumulate on some of the more out-of-the-way piles.

"I apologize for the mess," he says distractedly. "The kitchen is this way; that's where I see them most frequently."

She thinks it's pretty. The apartment, not the ants, although she is capable of admitting that she's gained a certain appreciation for ants, too. The sort of respect one extends to a worthy opponent. But they don't belong in apartments, especially in apartments that would be really nice without them. 

"OK! We'll figure this out." It occurs to her that it is really primarily her responsibility to figure this out, but teamwork is going to make that simpler. "How long ago did you first notice them?"

"I saw one several weeks ago and didn't think much of it, and then last week they began making inroads on the kitchen, which was both much more visible and much more concerning."

When they reach the kitchen - which is much less cluttered; the sink is empty, the counters spotless - he points up at a corner of the ceiling where a few black specks are wandering up and down the wall.

"OK! That's good, they're probably not super established yet. Some people wait a lot longer than a few weeks, and that mostly doesn't go super well." 

She sets her bag of supplies on the counter, unfolds her small folding ladder, and climbs up to see what she's dealing with. 

The ants have found a very small crack in the corner of the ceiling. Occasionally one emerges from it or crawls back inside. The ones on the walls are milling about aimlessly, unable to find anything that interests them.

The resident hovers awkwardly by the door to the living room.

She pulls out a magnifying glass, and is silent for a few seconds. She knocks on the wall, listening, and then starts talking again as she gets her tools. It's unclear whether she's primarily talking to him or to herself.

"Mhmm. This isn't bad at all, really. These are moisture ants. Nice little guys, comparatively speaking, though they do speed up the natural decaying process of wood. It's weird to find them here, though, your walls are not remotely damp enough to support them. The main thing is gonna be figuring out where they're coming from, and then we can clean up the stragglers. Is there a garden on the roof?"

"There is... something on the roof that may at one time have been a garden," he says. "Most of the roof space is bare concrete, but there's a planter along the south edge that I believe still has some dirt in it."

"Seems like a suspect. I'm gonna check it out, do you want to come along? Uh, you don't have to, if you have important things to do right now."

"I wouldn't want to bother you..."

"It's not a bother! I think better when I'm talking to people. Also it's like, your apartment building, you might know more about what's up there than I do."

"Your logic is undeniable. Lead on."

This is not something people usually tell her, at least not in those words. She smiles, then grabs her bag and her ladder and leads them to the roof.

He follows.

The roof is, as promised, mostly bare concrete. As they emerge from the building, there's a wooden bucket next to the door containing various small scraps of metal, and hanging from the wall directly over the bucket is a long stick with a handle at one end and a dark cylinder at the other. The rest of the roof has a few more additions, some more identifiable than others: a furnace, a stack of warped boards, a tidy little firepit. The ex-planter is on the far side, a long rectangle with thick concrete walls mostly full of miscellaneous slag, with an occasional determined weed poking a stem up through the scorched wood chips and globs of congealed glass.

She smiles at the obvious evidence of some kind of creative work being done here.

"Oh, neat, does someone make stuff up here?"

"Yes, most of the people who live in this building are crafters of one sort or another, machinists and woodworkers and so on."

"Cool. My grandmother is a carpenter, I bet she could use a lot of this stuff. I was always pretty hopeless at it. But I can totally get rid of ants!"

"A valuable service," he says seriously, peering into the planter in search of ants but seeing only dirt and broken ceramic.

She pulls out a trowel and starts digging.

"There are definitely less disruptive ways to gather evidence, but since nobody's actually using this planter, and since moisture ants really aren't dangerous, we might as well save some time. Even if someone did want to grow something here, we'd probably have to get rid of the glass pieces first."

"Yes," he agrees.

It doesn't take very much digging to reveal an ant nest under the dirt, near one end of the planter and next to a pile of splintered scraps of wood.

"OK! So this is your culprit here. Since the nest is out of the way like this, you have options. The cheapest thing is probably to poison them here, which is totally viable, since there aren't any plants or people to be careful of. Then we can plug up the cracks in your ceiling, and any ants stuck in your kitchen will starve there in just a few days, as long as you don't leave any food out for them. Shouldn't need to leave any poison in the kitchen, which is good, given that it's a kitchen. If the poison hasn't worked a week from now, we can remove the entire planter and solve the problem that way. Can't do that today, though, 'cause there isn't space in the truck to haul it away right now. Sound good?"

She smiles brightly. 

He smiles tentatively back. "Yes, thank you."

She pulls out the appropriate poison and appropriate safety gear, then gets to work, continuing to absentmindedly talk about insects and various methods of defeating them. Occasionally she references her second job at the city museum of science, which mostly has nothing to do with insects, but because she's there all the time, she has read all the information in the insect section several times. Also all the information in every other section. 

He listens with interest, but comments only occasionally. When she mentions reading the exhibits at the science museum, he actually smiles.

What a good smile. Maybe not an obviously pretty smile, but a good one.

She announces that the planter has been sufficiently poisoned, puts a sticker on it warning people not to touch it, and returns to his apartment to wash her hands.

His apartment is available for this purpose! He seems a little more comfortable in her presence now, and even smiles when he apologizes again for the condition of his living room.

She smiles back as she assures him that it's fine. And then she washes her hands, like a responsible poison user who does not want to poison everything she touches. She nods at some of the clockwork in the other room.

"So, do you make stuff, too?"

"Yes," he says. "Clocks and things. I have something of a talent for it. My latest project is a reconstruction of a mechanical computer from before the days of electricity."

"Woah," she says, in a tone of voice that suggests that this is genuinely the coolest thing she's heard today. "That's so cool!"

She spends a second trying to think of a way to expand on this thought, but she's not really sure how to do that without geeking out about historical technologies in the middle of her work shift, and that seems like it might be both kind of weird and also not what she's being paid for. Instead, she spins around and sets up her ladder again. 

—he smiles. "Well, I thought so, at least. It's fascinating to begin to grasp the true breadth of what can be accomplished by a lot of small oddly-shaped pieces of metal all working together."

"Yeah!" she agrees, although she's pretty sure she has not actually begun to grasp this. She's looking at the ceiling, not at him; she figures maybe she can get away with a little geeking out if she's also doing the thing she's being paid for. "I'm not like an expert or anything, but I like to read about old technologies sometimes. It's really cool to see how much people can still do when they're missing certain ideas. And it's cool to see which things hold them back, too."

"The main thing holding back Korel be-Baj was insufficiently precise manufacturing processes. Well, and not having invented electrical circuits all on her lonesome, I suppose. It's been a real challenge to construct everything to the specified tolerances."

She is not super sure how to encourage him to tell her more about this, but she tries to say vaguely encouraging things while she seals the crack in the ceiling. 

He is happy to linger in the kitchen and talk. After another minute or so, he puts on the kettle and opens a somewhat overpopulated tea cupboard. "—oh, I feel terribly rude not offering you a cup—do you want one? Most of this is experimental, but I have all the normal varieties as well."

She has had tea, like, twice in her life. One of the cups was medicinal and awful, and she's pretty sure she screwed the other one up somehow, such that it was also awful. It's also possible that tea is just awful in general, in which case she would definitely have to drink an entire cup of awful, because there's no way she'd be able to discreetly pour it out or summon the confidence to say that she disliked it. This is actually a rather significant risk, she should maybe not accept.

On the other hand, she is ahead of schedule.

"Sure, I'll have some! That's so thoughtful of you!"

He smiles slightly. "Do you have a preference for what kind, or should I just guess?"

Oh man, what are words for kinds of tea. She must have heard these at some point. Uh.

"I'm curious about the experimental ones, actually."

"Experimental tea it is, then."

She finishes fixing the ceiling as she waits for tea.

The tea is done before she is. He decides to go with something sweet and subtle for her cup, so as not to be overwhelming if she isn't much of a tea person, as he suspects she is not.

She drinks tea. She isn't sure she likes it, but it's distinctly non-awful.

"Hmm," she says, thoughtfully. "Well, I'm not an expert, but I think this may be one of the best cups of tea I've ever had."

...he smiles. "I'm glad to hear it."

"Thanks for sharing it with me! I'm glad I got the chance to try it."

She glances at a clock on the wall. She should probably get going pretty soon, you can't just hang out in random people's houses forever. 

"OK! So, it'll take a few days for the ants to die off, but if they're still here in a week, you should call us and I'll haul away the planter. That'll fix it for sure, though hopefully we already fixed it. Was there anything else?"

He shakes his head. "No, that's all. Thank you."

"Thank you. Payment will be handled automatically, and if we didn't get the ants this time, the second visit will carry no additional cost, 'cause that's on me."

She grabs her bag and starts looking through it, checking that she has everything she brought with her. She's pretty sure she does. 

"OK! Looks like that's everything. I'd ask to see the mechanical computer, 'cause it sounds super cool, but I should probably get going if I want to make it to my next job on time."

Slight smile. "I wouldn't want to make you late to work. Take care."

She smiles back. "Thanks! You too!"

And she's off to go clean things.

It transpires that the ants are stubborn. He calls the pest control people again a few days later.

Kairda specifically volunteers to be the one to go back, unwilling to trust her coworkers to erase this stain on her honor. The ants have won the battle. They will not win the war.

She arrives bright and early the morning after he calls, armed with apologies, a bigger truck, and a forklift.

Madral brings down the building's service elevator to meet her. It's big enough to admit her forklift with room to spare, and its weight rating scoffs at a mere planter.

"Really sorry about this!" she says earnestly, for at least the second time, when the planter has been safely transported to the truck. She's not super sure what she's going to do with it, but the ants are definitely not getting back to the apartment from here.

Still, best to be safe. "We'd better treat the kitchen this time to be sure we got them all. You won't have to worry about having poison on your counters or anything, I have time to scrub them down afterwards."

"Thank you. And I apologize again for the condition of my living room," he says wryly.

"It's totally fine! I've seen lots of places in worse shape."

She notes on her way to the kitchen that the various piles have mostly not moved since she was here last. The clutter is persistent.

"If it bothers you, though, I'm really good at cleaning houses, too. I used to have an industrial cleaning certification and everything. Not that this requires anything on that scale, of course. I can't do anything now, 'cause I have to separate company time from freelance cleaning time, but I can totally come back later if you think it'd be helpful."

"—that would be very helpful indeed," he says, surprised. "I—thank you."

"It's no problem! I mean, you do have to pay me, 'cause I do have to buy food and pay rent and stuff, but I'm super reasonable. I think. I guess most people probably think that, but I'm pretty sure it's true."

She cheerfully gets to work ridding the kitchen of ants.

"Yes, of course. I am happy to pay you."

The ants quail before her might!

They do!

She talks as she works, given that she has no particular reason to stop. It takes her a while to be satisfied that both the ants and the poison have been thoroughly removed, but eventually, she stands back and nods decisively at her work.

"Thank you very much."

"You are absolutely welcome! Um, is there any specific time I should come back to clean your living room?"

She pulls out a pocket calendar and frowns at her schedule. It may be excessively full, but she's pretty sure she can make it work. She's pretty good at making things work.

"My schedule is fairly open; what times work for you?"

She points out the few remaining empty places in her disaster schedule. Most of the areas not marked "WORK: Pest Control" or "WORK: museum" either have addresses and a drawing of a broom next to them, or have notes like "take Zada to competition", "babysit Alvade (+ do dishes?)" or "sleep, FOR REAL".

"Sleep, FOR REAL" occurs only every other day.

...he blinks at this unexpectedly clear view into the structure of her life, but then picks out a time slot that doesn't look like it's directly competing with sleep.

She smiles. "OK! That works perfectly. I'll see you in a few days, then! Take care!"

He smiles back. "And the same to you."

The ants do not return this time, but Kairda does. The time spot selected is in the early afternoon, following a morning museum shift and followed by one marked ZADA, in block letters underlined three times. It's not for a while, though.

She cheerfully knocks on his door for the third time.

He answers the door with a smile. "Hello again."

"Hi! So, where did you want to start? I think the books are probably easier to start with than the clockwork thingies, 'cause I'm not super sure how a person is supposed to store clockwork thingies."

"Part of the reason my living room is covered in them is because I have run out of sensible places to put clockwork thingies," he says wryly. "I found an empty box to stack them in for now, but yes, the books will probably be easier."

"That makes sense! We'll have the books organized in no time, and then if it turns out we need more space for your projects, we can figure out how to make that happen. You want them organized alphabetically, or by subject, or something else? Libraries do nonfiction by subject and fiction by subject and author, so that's what I'm used to, but we should do whatever works for you."

"I'm hardly about to argue with a library about how to organize books," he says, smiling slightly.

"OK! I worked in a library for like two years, so I can do it the same way here, no problem."

She gets to work organizing books.

"The range of your knowledge and experience is fascinating," he comments.

She laughs a little, not exactly sure how to accept a compliment that nice. "Thanks! But it's really just that I keep having to switch jobs. I haven't done anything really difficult, I don't think, just a lot of different things that somebody had to do. Like, it's really cool that you're putting so much effort into making things, because that sort of focus lets you develop skills you wouldn't be able to master in a shorter amount of time, you know?"

"I certainly do have a lot of skill at making clockwork. I don't believe that's any more useful to the world than shelving books and controlling pests. Less, if anything."

"I don't think so! It's good for the world to have lots of beautiful clocks in it, and you're way better than the average person at making them, right? You can probably make things that nobody else would have thought to make. So if you didn't do what you were doing, then the world would be out a bunch of beautiful things entirely, and that would just be a loss. But lots of people can shelve books and kill ants and clean things, so I'm only adding value to the world insofar as I do those things better than whoever would have my job if I didn't, you know?" 

She pauses, slightly self-conscious about having this sort of conversation with someone who's paying her to be doing something else. But it's nice.

Madral smiles.

"So the question becomes, which is of more value to society: useful important work that anyone could do but most people won't, or frivolous work that is genuinely irreplaceable? An interesting conundrum. I'm not at all sure of the answer."

Kairda smiles back. 

"Yeah, it is a good question. I think it probably depends on where the rest of society is. The reason we think of some work as more useful than other work is that it opens up more possibilities. If nobody grew any food for us, then we couldn't begin to think about running libraries or making fancy clocks or mapping the stars. So it is really important that someone grow food and that somebody clean things, because if nobody does, then the rest of society is stuck where it is, and nobody can do anything really amazing. But it'd also be wrong for us to say that the things built on top of other people's work don't also have value, because if they didn't, we wouldn't be working so hard to maintain the resources we need for them, you know?"

"I see what you mean, but I still find myself wishing for a more practical talent."

"That's fair! I think if you really want to do something else, too, then you probably can, even if you don't have a talent for it. Talent's a real thing and all, but you don't need it for everything. I probably have, like, two talents or something, but I have a lot more than two things I can do with any degree of skill."

She steps back and double-checks the bookshelf's organizational scheme, nods decisively, and moves on to dusting.

"If I weren't quite so good at my totally useless skill, I'd consider picking up another trade. But as it is... whenever I turn my hand to a task outside my specialty, I feel like one of those birds that can barely walk, hobbling awkwardly along the ground when instead I could be flying."

"That's a good metaphor. I think I feel sort of like that all the time. But it does mean you can reach more places, if you're willing to try walking, because not every place can be flown to." She frowns. "I mean, I guess most places can be? Maybe if you wanted to like, explore a cave or something. Or the ocean. Or the inside of a building. And like, birds don't do those things and they get along fine, I bet they have a great time, so it totally makes sense if it seems like it's too much effort. But it is nice, being able to go lots of places. So I think if you did decide to pick up another skill as, like, a hobby or something, then you probably wouldn't regret it. I don't think I ever do." 

She picks up a piece of clockwork and inspects it, trying to figure out what it does and where she should move it to make the space more liveable. "On the other hand, it's probably also a really good use of time to capitalize on the skills you already have, and keep honing those? Because what you're doing now actually is really cool."

"An interesting perspective," he says thoughtfully. "I'll keep it in mind in case of future need."

"Hope it helps!"

She scans the room. "I can put all the clockwork in the box, but it'd probably be best if you had another shelf, maybe there or somewhere? Then you could easily access and display all your stuff, without it ending up in a jumble and breaking."

"Yes, I see what you mean."

It really would be better if there was another shelf. Unfortunately, she's terrible at carpentry, and you can't really suggest that the person who hired you to clean should go out and buy a shelf right now.

"Well. We can work with what we have for now."

He smiles. "Yes."

She gets to work carefully moving the clockwork into the box he found earlier, sometimes asking him what particular pieces do. 

He is happy to explain the functions of various items. Most of them are pieces of some larger project, but some are complete in themselves - a pendant watch, a pendulum clock, a small proof-of-concept calculating machine that can only add two numbers each of which must be either zero or one. It ticks along very charmingly in pursuit of its result.

She listens with interest. They make steady progress, and eventually, the entire room is properly clean.

"Thank you very much," he says. "You may have to come back in a few weeks; I'm sure I'll have let the place slide back into disaster by then."

She smiles. "OK! It took a little under two hours, so fifteen noavo? If you give me your everything number I can send you the bill right now, it'll just need you to specify your banking number and sign off on the amount. And then I can leave my contact info here, too, and you can call the next time you need me."

She takes out a pocket notebook, scrawls an everything number, labels it 'Cleaner/Kairda', and then tears out the paper and hands it to him.

He smiles back, writes his own number down, and trades one paper for the other. "Excellent, thank you."

"My pleasure."

She punches in the number and sends him the bill. She then waves goodbye and leaves to take care of Zada, figuring the block letters and underlining in her calendar are not to be taken lightly. 

He overpays her - twenty instead of fifteen - because she seems like she could use a little extra in her life. Calls her back again a few weeks later, having arrayed the boxful of clockworks on a shiny new shelf in the suggested location but allowed several more drifts of books to accumulate in the meantime.

She clears out space on her calendar and arrives the next day, this time with a purple-haired one-month-old baby in a sling. 

He opens the door and—

—smiles at the baby and completely forgets what he was going to say.

"Hi! Alvade's mom has a doctor's appointment and her dad is taking her mom to the doctor, so I said I'd watch Alvade for the day and I hope that's OK?"

"Yes, of course." (He can't seem to stop smiling.)

Alvade blinks at him and gurgles.

"Oh good! We usually have lots of people to watch her, it's just that sometimes life things happen and her parents need some help." She notes the smile. "Do you want to hold her while I clean? You know how to hold a baby, right?"

"I—um—I haven't really—had the chance before," he stutters apologetically.

"Gosh," she says, mildly surprised. "You don't have to, if you'd rather not, of course. But it's not hard! You just have to make sure you support the head properly. See?" 

She removes the baby from the sling and demonstrates.

Madral is enthralled.

She rocks Alvade a few times, gently. "Like I said, the main thing is that you support the head. Her neck muscles aren't developed enough for her to do it herself yet. You want to try?"

"Yes please."

She passes the baby to him, guiding his arms into the correct position. "There you go. See? Easy."

Alvade blinks up at him.

Aaaaaaaaaaa baby baby.

They're adorable.

Kairda gets to work moving the books back to the shelf. 

Madral is utterly absorbed in the task of holding this baby.

This is an appropriate amount of attention to invest in a tiny baby. She clears the books away, then does the same for the dust.

"It's hard to tell very much about her personality right now. I think she has one, she just has a hard time expressing it without any words or the ability to manipulate objects and stuff."

"It must be very difficult for her," he muses.

"Probably. Most things are difficult at first, so it's probably really difficult to be new to everything at the same time. But it gets easier. And she's surrounded by lots of people who care about her, and that helps, too."

"I imagine it would."

She nods, not noticing any hint of melancholy around this observation. When she's satisfied that the room is clean, she takes a moment to admire the new shelf and its contents. 

"I like the way you decided to display them here. The main thing is that they're easier to store and retrieve this way, but I think it improves the atmosphere of the room, too. Uh, did you need any other rooms cleaned, or is this the only one?"

He shakes his head. "None of the others get this bad. Here—" He carefully and reluctantly offers her the baby.

She delightedly scoops up the baby, then returns her to the sling so that she can use her hands again. She sends him the bill via her everything. Same price as last time.

(And this time, once he's seen them off, he pays her double.)

She takes note of the overpayment this time - she saw it last time, too, but last time it was within the bounds of a reasonable tip. This is pretty clearly outside them. She can think of a few reasons why someone might pay double for ordinary services - ridiculously generous temperament, an attempt to drive home that she did a really good job, an attempt to cause her to prioritize his business over that of other customers, a uniquely strong commitment to some economic theory that doesn't involve trusting the free market to make pricing decisions, some kind of poorly communicated attempt to negotiate for a different kind of service - is that more than a few? She's just not sure which one it is.

She can't think of a non-awkward way to broach the subject the next few times she sees him, so she decides to just keep cleaning his house regularly and figure out a plan of action if the amount escalates further. Maybe it'll go away if she ignores it, and then she won't have to worry about messing things up with her response.

It stays at double, and he never brings it up.

This is weird, but less weird than the alternative. It probably doesn't demand immediate action. She adjusts her set of theories and gives additional weight to "disapproves of the free market", but mostly she lets herself be happy about it and makes sure to keep a regular space open on her calendar. It takes about two months for her curiosity to get the better of her. She figures he probably won't fire her after two months of paying double what he needs to.

"So," she says, in the middle of reorganizing the bookshelf again. She figures this is a good time, because it means she has an excuse not to make eye contact, and she's not great at talking and making eye contact and being nervous at the same time. "You know it's not customary to pay people twice what they bill you, right?"

"I'm aware," he says. "But you seem like a very busy person who makes much less money than I do and could probably benefit from a little more. And I appreciate your willingness to put up with me."

She pauses. She's never really sure what to do when people say nice things to her in real life. Maybe she should work on figuring that out. She's also suddenly really thankful that she's looking at the bookshelf.

"You're really not hard to put up with, you know," she says, after a while. "I mean, I do appreciate the extra money, it's really nice of you, but I'd be happy to come here regardless. Probably because you're the sort of person who thinks about things like that in general. Also the clockwork is really cool. But mostly the first thing."

"Well—thank you."

"Mhm! I really like coming here." She goes back to putting the books away. "Sometimes I really miss working at a nursing home. Some of the people where I was didn't really get visitors, so it was nice for them to be able to pretend that the cleaner was a visitor. And it's nice to go around visiting people all day, because most people are pretty great. But you don't really get to do that as much when you're cleaning normal apartments. Which makes sense, of course, people shouldn't have to talk to strangers just because they want to pay those strangers to clean things. But I do really like getting to visit you."

"I'm—glad you like it. I feel similarly."

She continues to regularly clean his apartment for a while longer. It continues to be nice.

Partway through summer, Kairda's cousin and his wife start talking about getting their own space, now that her cousin has a decent job and the baby isn't so small. She doesn't want to be in the way. She also really doesn't want to move to another urban center - bad enough that she's already polluted three cities and a tiny town in the arctic. She can't stop being polluted, and she doesn't want to drag Zada away from the educational opportunities the cities afford, but it's evil to keep living like this without so much as an attempt to limit the scope of the disaster. She's OK with being evil, given the alternative, but she really wishes she weren't.

It occurs to her that there is a place that isn't a major urban center, but which does provide a lot of space-related opportunities. It further occurs to her that the competition for long-term cleaning posts on the primary Voan moon base can't be that steep - space is great, but there are only so many people who are willing to put up with permaspring.

She lands a job on the moon. She tells her family, notifies her primary boss, and drafts a post to inform the followers of her writing blog. She forgets to tell Madral.

He's a little concerned when she suddenly vanishes, but there's not really much he can do about it. If something came up in her life, a move or a new job opportunity or a family emergency of some sort, it would be entirely reasonable of her not to broadcast it to all the people whose houses she has been known to clean on occasion.

A year passes. Kairda hangs out on the moon for a couple seasons, secret red niece in tow. Zada is incredibly studious throughout, and they come back in winter so that Zada can have her first spring on Amenta. It isn't a particularly pleasant time for anyone, and Kairda determines that the only way to make her niece feel OK about herself is to get her into one of the red-cleaning batches in recently-founded Miolee. She has to convince her nephew to pitch in, plus abandon her writing and her social life to work as many hours as possible of the highest-paying jobs she can snag, but after more than a season of wringing every possible second out of the clock, she pulls together enough money to get Zada into decontam.

She then takes three decontamination showers back to back, quits all her jobs, and burns out completely. She doesn't really remember that week. She ends up working a single delivery job, trying to remember how to stop being quite so tired and lonely all the time. She's not very good at it, but she's OK at faking.

One day, entirely coincidentally, she's tasked with delivering materials to someone named Madral. There are probably lots of Madrals in the world. Most of them are probably not as cool as the one she used to know, but they're probably still pretty cool, so she still smiles when she knocks on the door. It's, like, seventy-five percent forced this time.

He opens the door, with that same apologetic face from the very first time they met.

Except this time, as soon as he sees her, he blinks and then smiles.

"Kairda! What a marvellous coincidence! How have you been?"

Her brain processes the face before the words. He has such a good smile. Way better than her smile, she's pretty sure, which immediately melts in the face of something that deviates from the memorized script she's been reciting. She hasn't felt this relieved to see someone in months, and he's not even really her friend, he's just a really, really nice customer she had once. Stars, but she leads a pathetic existence.

Then her brain processes the words, and she laughs - half with the absurdity of how terribly she's been doing, and half with delight that he remembers her name.

"Wow. I, um, have been a lot of things? Uh, I was traveling some, and I spent some time working as a gardener, and I guess I was on the moon for a bit - oh no, I probably forgot to tell you I was going to the moon, my bad, there was this whole thing - I should tell you about it, but I should also give you this package you ordered, probably -"

He laughs and holds his hand out for the package. "Do you have time to come in for a cup of tea?"

She checks her everything. She's already behind, she super definitely doesn't have time.

"Yeah! Of course! Not a ton of time, but yeah, definitely!"

He sets the package on a side table and beckons her in with a wave of his hand, still smiling in an incredulously delighted sort of way.

"I'll put the kettle on. Did you say moon—?"

"Yeah!" Oh good, this part is way easier to explain than the rest of what she's been doing. She can handle this. "Irdeza, the one with the big Voan base on it? Uh, my cousins wanted to have the apartment to themselves, so I had to move out. My niece has been obsessed with space since she was barely one, and I figured since we were moving anyway, it'd be really cool to live on the moon for a bit, you know?"

She laughs weakly, feeling like this is a really flimsy explanation for suddenly moving to the moon. She did suddenly move to the arctic that one time, though, so clearly she's the sort of person who does that sometimes.

"I admire the audacity of moving to the Irdeza base simply because you need to move somewhere and a moon sounds interesting," he comments as he sets up the kettle.

She has a hard time believing that any of her recent actions have been particularly admirable, especially leaving for the moon for no immediately apparent reason. If he didn't sound so sincere, she might suspect that he was making fun of her, but she's pretty sure he isn't.

"Thank you. It was nice! Zada absolutely loved it there, I'm really glad we went. I wish I'd remembered to tell you I was going, though. I hope it wasn't too much of an inconvenience?"

"I assumed something had come up, although I admit 'moved to a separate celestial body' was not in my list of hypotheses. My apartment got a little messier, but I managed."

"I'm glad."

Frick, she's gonna have to leave this apartment as soon as the tea is done, then at least try to finish the rest of her orders. And then she'll be back to her incredibly dull life, which currently lacks anything else even half as pleasant as this sort of casual conversation. There has to be a way to prevent this. 

"How have you been recently? Working on any new projects?"

"Old projects, in a sense. Someone was impressed with my work on the calculating engine and wanted me to build a better one, something closer to a true mechanical computer. I'm enjoying it immensely."

"I'm glad." Oh wait, no, she already said that. Different words, Kairda. She's pretty sure she knows lots of them.

"What's this one capable of? The original calculating engine could only handle basic arithmetic, right? Is it possible to do anything more complex without introducing electricity?"

She doesn't know anything about computers and isn't at all sure she's going to be able to understand any explanation he offers, but as long as she's saying things that aren't totally out of line with the flow of the conversation, maybe she'll have time to come up with something. 

"In theory, clockwork can do anything electricity can do, although not nearly as quickly. In practice, speed is a fairly serious limitation. No one will be playing Alarmadillo on a clockwork everything anytime soon. But I've managed several fancy tricks that improve on the original design in both speed and scope."

"Cool! I'd love to see it sometime and hear more about how it works."

She tries to think of something more interesting or elaborate to say about the clockwork computer, something that more clearly conveys that she is, in fact, impressed that so much can be accomplished given the limitations he's working with. She fails to come up with anything. And it's not like she can talk about her life; all the interesting things it once contained have been cut out over the course of the past couple seasons. 

Talking is so much harder than she remembers. 

"Are you still making custom tea blends?"

"Yes. I think I have a new one you'll like, if I'm remembering your preferences correctly—you seemed to enjoy my fruit teas."

He remembers what kind of tea he used to give her. She remembers all kinds of details like that about most of her past customers, but she's not used to people remembering that many details about her. It's nice. 

"Yeah, that's right! I've missed it."

This isn't a lie, she reasons, because she really did miss receiving tea. The fact that she has a hard time producing opinions on tea itself is a minor technicality.

He selects an appropriate tea. "Well, here we are again. I'm sure the tea has missed you as well."

She laughs weakly and ducks her head. It sounds like he wouldn't mind seeing her again. Now if she can just think of a reason for that to happen.

Think. Think. Augh.

Madral smiles awkwardly. He can't think of anything else to say. How does normal conversation work? What is friendship and how do you get it and by what signs do you identify its presence?

She lets the silence continue for several seconds. At that point there's really no way to escape the awkwardness. They're going to be stuck like this until one of them thinks of something, and she has no reason to believe that Madral is currently trying to think of an excuse for her to come back to his house, so if she doesn't think of something soon, then she's just not going to get to come back.

This would be terrible. 

She stares at the wall, nervously balls one hand into a fist so tight it hurts, and does her absolute best to ignore the lurching in her stomach. "I'm trying really hard to think of an excuse to ask to come back here after my shift, because you're really great and I'd really like to spend more time with you, but I'm sort of worried that I'm not going to think of anything before the tea is done."

"...I am... having a similar problem," he admits. "Perhaps you could neglect the excuse and come back anyway."

She's still not looking at him, but she does smile.

"I would like that."

"As would I."

She wonders if this is a good time to mention that she lied about having time. Probably not. That would probably lead to her not getting tea.

"So, uh, have you lived here very long? I've only been living in this city for a couple months."

"Longer than that. About half a year. My previous apartment building was torn down, and I had the money to move somewhere with more space and better privacy, so I did."

"Oh wow, that's - um, I guess it's all right, if you like this place better anyway. It's definitely a nice place."

"I miss the rooftop workspace; it turns out those are hard to find. But everything else about this place is excellent."

She compliments his apartment a few times and makes awkward small talk until the tea is done. She resists the impulse to check her everything for the time. 

The apartment is worth complimenting. Spacious, attractively decorated, less cluttered than his previous one.

The tea, when made and cooled to a drinkable temperature after only a few minutes in total, is delicious.

She lets him know that the tea is, in fact, delicious.

And then she does check her everything. She apologetically tells him that she had better finish the rest of her deliveries, but that she'll be back later, if that's OK. She gives him her everything info again so that he can reach her if something weird happens and she for some reason doesn't show up.

She doesn't tell him she's more than half an hour behind schedule now; that doesn't seem super important.

He smiles and wishes her well and expresses a positive opinion of her decision to come back later.

She makes it through her shift and apologizes profusely for her lateness at the end. She is told to come in later for what she expects to be a reprimand, but for the moment they let her go with little more than a sigh. She arrives back at her apartment and paces around for a while, trying to think of some kind of strategy for interacting like a person. She's not sure how many more awkward silences can happen before Madral decides she maybe isn't such a great potential friend after all.

Coming up with conversation topics is hard. Baking pies sounds marginally easier. She's pretty sure people like pies.

She shows up outside Madral's apartment with a homemade pie a few hours later. 

He opens his door and is once again delighted to see her.

"Hi! I um. Had this pie. And it's hard to eat an entire pie by yourself."

This is the sum total of her plan for this interaction. Why did she not prepare more. Hopefully it's a really good pie.

...He smiles, half quizzical, half endeared.

"I would be happy to help."

"Oh good," she says, more relieved than she probably should be. She steps inside.

"It might not be a very good pie. My grandfather is a chef and I learned how to make them from him, but I'm not, like, a professional or anything? I've never been that good at preparing food. But hopefully it's, um, serviceable."

"I do not anticipate having any complaints about the quality of the pie."

She has not gotten any better at being a person since this morning. Maybe she can just ramble about food while she sets the pie up on the counter.

"Well, I hope it lives up to your expectations, then. My grandmother used to try to convince me to be a chef all the time, so my cooking probably isn't completely terrible. But we'll have to see."

"I look forward to the experiment."

He has plates! And cutlery! In his kitchen! And he can put the kettle on again!

She cuts slices of pie and sets them on plates. The pie is still sort of warm. She's pretty sure it's super obvious that she just decided to make a pie for no reason. Maybe she can just ramble about that. If she rambles enough then there can't be any more awkward silences where she's forced to examine her inability to engage in basic social interaction.

"Ha. I dunno if it's as interesting as the tea, but maybe it's similar? I like cooking because it's making something straightforwardly useful, you know? It's not like a pie is going to be super earth-shattering for anyone, but sometimes it's nice to remind myself that I can, like, cause things to exist in the world that didn't exist in quite that way before I got there. And then eat them."

He smiles.

"I think that's a valuable perspective on life."

What are you supposed to do when people say nice things. Aaa. Maybe you give them the slice of pie you just cut. She does that and hopes it's somewhere in the ballpark of a reasonable response.

Madral seems to think so!

"I was right," he says after a moment. "I have no complaints about this pie whatsoever."

"I'm glad. I'm sort of out of practice, but maybe I can make another sometime."

"That sounds like a fine idea, particularly if it results in you bringing me more pie."

"That sounds like a thing that can definitely happen!"

She has no idea how to come up with another topic of conversation. Has she always been this bad at talking to people or is this a new thing. Aaa.

....at least he liked the pie. Making the pie was apparently somehow not a tactical error.

"It's very good pie. And I appreciate your company."

Oh. Well. In that case.

"I'm glad. I don't know if I'm very good company right now, not the way I was, but if you're OK with that then I guess it's OK. And I appreciate your company, too."

"If my ambition is to be your friend, which it is, I hardly think that I would be upholding the standards of the craft if I criticized the quality of your company when you're clearly having some sort of a difficult time."

She really can't think of anything to say to that for a moment. But like, in a good way. The way where really good words have been said and you need to take a moment to let them really fill the space they need to fill, not the way where you don't know what comes next and you're terrified that the silence is going to turn awkward in the next few seconds.

"Thank you," she says, after a while. "I used to be better at this, I really did, things've just been..."

She waves her hand vaguely. 

He nods. "Some sort of difficult," he says, in the tone of someone who is perfectly content to accept that as the final word on the subject without further detail.

"Yes," she says quietly, though she doesn't think that quite conveys how grateful she is for being allowed to not have answers. "But it's going to be better now, I think. I'm a little out of practice at making friends, but I'm sure that's the sort of thing that comes back to people. Like riding a bicycle."

"I've never actually ridden a bicycle," Madral admits, with a slight smile.

"Oh, really? It's not very hard to learn, it's mostly about balancing correctly. My parents taught me before I turned two, I think. But of course it's not really necessary knowledge, you can always just take the trains or the buses. I haven't ridden one in a while - " she's not actually sure where most of her possessions have gotten to, at this point - "but, uh, I hear it comes back, if I ever need it again."

"Yes, I've heard that too. Though never about friendship."

"Seems like the sort of fundamental skill that'd come back to a person," she says, much more decisively than she feels. It's important to at least pretend to be optimistic about these things.

"Plausible," he acknowledges. "I have no more expertise with friendship than I do with bicycles, so I wouldn't know."

"You've never had a friend?" she asks, very quietly, like being quiet enough about it will make it a maybe less upsetting conversation topic. "Not ever?"

He shakes his head.

"Wow," she says, still quiet. "Um, but it's not very hard to learn or anything! And I don't think it's a thing where you have to figure it out before a certain point. So you'll be fine, I think. You're really nice and really fun to talk to, and I think most people like being friends with people like that."

She hasn't been having much fun talking, actually, but she's very sure that she would be having fun if she were slightly less terrible at all of this, which is not really a sign that Madral is in any way bad at having friends.

He smiles, tentatively.

"Thank you. I'm very glad you think so. You are... easier to talk to than most other people I have met."

"I'm glad! I think I used to be way better at that than I am now, but I worked pretty hard on it."

"With considerable success, it seems."

She smiles and blushes. "My favorite jobs were always the ones that gave me the chance to talk to people. Just incidentally, really, in the course of doing other things. Delivery's not terrible, but it doesn't have much of that. Pest control was more fun. Nursing homes are great, too, you get to talk to people who have all these stories stored up inside them. Sometimes they don't have anyone else to talk to, so a lot of them are really happy to share."

"That sounds..." He spends a moment searching for words. "...I want to say 'admirable' but I don't think the connotations are quite right."

"I don't know if it's admirable. It might be whatever other word you're thinking of. But I just like most people, you know? I'm like, greedy for the details of their lives and their perspectives, at least when I'm not too busy thinking about my own problems. I try not to be too busy. It's way better for everyone when I'm focusing on other people. So, uh, it makes sense to take jobs that keep me in that place, when I can find them."

"I'm not sure there is a word I'm thinking of," he says. "I don't mean 'admirable' in the sense of 'a noble self-sacrifice worth being praised for'; the fact that you like to be doing this, that you have your own reasons for it and your own ways of benefiting from it, only makes it better. Perhaps I more mean... 'worth admiring'. I think the world is a richer place for having people like you in it. I think it's - important, and good, and too often undervalued, for there to be people in the world who make a habit of seeking out connections with those who have too few. I think... these small, simple interactions between people are the thread that holds the world together, and you are making much-needed repairs to the places where the fabric of society has worn thin."

"I'm glad you think so," she says quietly, like this observation is much more important to her than she's entirely willing to admit. "Um - since we're both, uh, variously inexperienced and out of practice at making personal connections, do you want to maybe - I dunno how long I can keep a real conversation going, but, uh, there's a secondhand bookstore a few blocks away from here that I've been meaning to go to if I ever had the time or energy - lots of time, these days, very little energy - but, uh, if you wanted, maybe we could go sometime? See what they have?"

She's sure it's indicative of some special level of incompetence that they've already admitted that excuses are mostly unnecessary and she's still nervous about coming up with a decent one. But she is.

—he smiles. "That would be lovely."

"OK then! Uh, I have no idea what your schedule looks like - mine's pretty open these days, though my hours are weird and if there's a pattern to them it defies easy explanation. I'm, uh, not actually doing anything now, but of course if you have a thing - or if you just need time to prepare yourself for bookstore expeditions and don't want to go wandering off at a moment's notice, I'm sure most people don't, then we could do it later? Or like - any time, really."

Aaaa what are words and how does she use them, she remembers knowing this at some point -

"In... in a few days, perhaps?" he suggests. "I don't want you to think your company is not welcome, it is in fact the most welcome thing I can imagine, but - I do like to take some time to prepare before I leave the house."

"No, no, it's totally fine and sensible! That's, uh, why I preemptively said it was fine and sensible." 

- oh, huh, 'most welcome thing I can imagine' sure is a thing to say.

He smiles again, tentatively.

" - so, in a few days," she echoes, whipping out a pocket calendar. It's a new calendar because it's a new year now, but apparently this habit has survived whatever else she's been through. "So, like, day after tomorrow at fiveish, and then we can look at books and maybe get something to eat afterwards?"

"Yes, that sounds like an excellent plan."

"Excellent." She scribbles it down in the calendar and then pauses. " - uh, I keep feeling like I should say I have a thing and head out, but I don't actually have a thing and I don't know if I even want to leave, I just, uh, can't think of anything else to say off the top of my head."

Why did she even say that. What kind of person narrates their thought processes with that level of honesty.

"Well, I'd hardly deny you the opportunity to leave if that was what you preferred, but I am also not going to kick you out of my apartment for being unable to think of anything to say," he says.

"...then I think I'll stay a bit longer," she says, and quietly munches her pie.

Madral smiles at her, as though having Kairda in his apartment quietly munching pie is one of the best ways he can think of for his day to be going.

Eventually she runs out of both room for pie and things to say. "...Alright, then. I'm really glad I came back here, if that isn't clear. And really glad we happened to run into each other in the first place. Day after tomorrow around five?"

He nods firmly. "Agreed. I will see you then."

So she goes. She mostly manages not to think too hard about going to the bookstore in two days, except for the few occasions on which her brain absolutely refuses to think about anything else. She makes sure she has enough money for books, plus enough for dinner if need be, and maybe she puts a little extra thought into what she's wearing but not enough that anybody can prove this, and then she shows up on the appointed day at precisely 4:58.

He answers the door very promptly, dressed like someone who doesn't want anyone to look at him.

She seems absolutely delighted to see him!

The bookstore is, as promised, only a few blocks away, and is easily within walking distance. She chats idly about the fact that she really likes paper books, even though they take up a ton of space in your house and are hard to move. She's not entirely sure where the ones she used to have have gotten to, between all the moving. Hopefully she can find some of her favorites at either her cousin's or her nephew's house; some of them were really old gifts with margin notes in them.

Madral likes paper books too!

"There's something comforting about an object with a real physical form that you can hold in your hands and - and see the whole of. Paper books have no secrets. They don't require electrical power to function and they can't be silently corrupted or deleted by accident; when they're damaged, the damage is visible. If civilization collapsed around us, there would still be paper books. They're... dependable."

"They are! I like that they're - they don't take any other infrastructure to be able to use, as long as you know how to read. Before we had writing we all had to produce our stories and our knowledge over and over again whenever someone needed it, and with digital books you have to make sure you have enough energy on hand to continue accessing them. But you always have a paper book, barring fire or really terrible water damage. Someone recorded a bunch of thoughts and now they're there, they're safe more or less forever, and anyone who has the book can access them. Of course digital books are also pretty good to have, since getting physical books to everyone is sort of a complicated logistical problem even when everyone's using the library system properly - "

And they're at the bookstore.

"They each have their place," he agrees, stepping inside the store with only a little hesitation. He's reluctant to get in anyone's line of sight if he can avoid it; the first thing he does once he gets inside is take a few quick steps to put some nice tall shelves between him and the cashier.

She notices this. She considers saying something - he doesn't look that horrible, she's not sure how anyone else can actually have a problem with someone just because their face doesn't look quite like other faces - but she can't think of a way to say it that doesn't sound weird or condescending or like she's making a bunch of assumptions, so she lets it go and heads over to the history section. 

There are lots of books on very high shelves about a multitude of different subjects.

Madral smiles at the books, and then at Kairda, as though she is somehow personally responsible for the invention of paper.

Then he starts browsing the shelves, glancing at interesting titles and once in a while pulling out a book to flip through it and see if it holds up to the promise of its cover.

She has somehow very nearly forgotten how excellent books are. She's pretty sure she used to like things, what did she like before everything happened?

She browses through histories and ancient poetry and books about anthropology and linguistics, then goes downstairs to check out what they have in the way of science fiction and roleplaying game guides. Occasionally she calls Madral over when she thinks she's found something really interesting, like a collection of historical letters or an old out of print poetry book that makes really impressive use of forms that she doesn't think she's figured out herself yet.

Madral is enchanted by her recommendations, and carefully examines each one. The historical letters and the poetry book are both especially good.

Books are so inherently excellent. (Madral is also excellent. It's so good when people are correct about books.) She doesn't actually have a ton of money with her, and she needs to keep some to pay for food later, but she holds onto the poetry book to buy when she's done.