Not the time, not the place, almost certainly not the man — though she couldn't have said why she'd even framed it as a question.

---

The sim froze the corridor around them and then dissolved it, the walls going back to the black-and-yellow grid of the empty room. The other three peeled off toward the rack, talking among themselves. Reed pulled his weapon down, turned to her, and stuck out a hand — an old-fashioned thing to do that somehow suited him.

"Reed Bishop, off the clock. Breach and engineering, Alpha." The grin again, warmer without the sim around it. "That was the cleanest anybody's run point on me in a while."

"Jessica Merida." She took the hand. Firm grip, careful, not making anything of it. "SIGINT. Alpha, same as you, apparently."

Something shifted in his face, pleased. "Same team. Good." He didn't let go quite as fast as the handshake needed, and he plainly knew it, and plainly wasn't sorry. "Then I'll get to do that again."

Neither of them had said a rank. In the sim there'd been no insignia, no billet, nothing but callsigns and how you moved. Now they stood in their own names with none of the usual scaffolding around them. He didn't know if she was above him or under him or dead level; it hadn't crossed his mind to check before he decided he liked her, which she noticed and counted in his favor. She couldn't place him either. A breach specialist with a manner that loose could be anything from a senior chief to a fresh crewman. She found she didn't want to ask yet. The moment they traded ranks, the whole thing would rearrange itself into something with rules, and she wasn't ready for the rules.

So neither of them asked.

She let go first, because one of them had to. They fell into step out of the sim without deciding to, toward the rack, and it should have been awkward and somehow wasn't.

"For the record," he said, racking his weapon, "I'm better than that made me look. It didn't give me much to blow up. One wall. That's not a job, that's a warm-up."

"You seemed to enjoy the one wall."

"I enjoy every wall." He said it with total sincerity. She made the mistake of glancing over and caught the corner of his mouth, and had to look back at the rack to keep her own face in order. "That's the whole appeal of the work, Merida. Somebody builds a thing specifically so people can't get through it, and then they hand me to the problem. It's very flattering. To me and the wall both."

"You're going to be a lot," she said, though it came out with less edge than she'd loaded into it.

"People tell me." He slung his gear and looked at her, in no rush to end the conversation and not pretending otherwise. "You run the late range on Deck eighteen? Somebody's been putting three-contact configs through it after the center goes quiet. Figured that was you before I ever saw your face."

She hadn't expected that — that he'd known of her before the room, that whatever reputation she had among the door-kickers had already reached him. "Most nights," she admitted. "Signals I don't have to practice. That I do."

"Then I'll see you down here." Like it was decided. Maybe it was. "Good to meet you, Firefly."

"It's Merida out of the sim."

"I know." He was already walking, that loose, unbothered amble, and he said it back over his shoulder without turning around. "I liked Firefly better."

Jessica stood a moment by the rack, gear in hand, irritated in a way that wasn't really irritation at all. She admitted to precisely no one that she was already looking forward to the next one, whatever his rank turned out to be.