He looked at the emitters.
She had a figure that the flight suit and the work clothes she wore on the ship had not suggested and had not hidden either, more a case of not having had occasion to notice what was actually there, which he was noticing now and filing in the category of information he was not going to do anything with but could not quite stop the filing process on. Lean and composed the way she was in everything, and there was a quality to the way she held herself even now, in a decontamination chamber in her underwear with nowhere to be for two hours, that was simply who she was in a way that he found considerably more compelling than the situation strictly required him to find it.
He looked at the emitters again.
Lindsy had registered Zedd's particular relationship with the ceiling within approximately thirty seconds of sitting down and had made her own assessment of the situation with the same methodical honesty she applied to most things. He was in dark boxer shorts and nothing else and he had the build that a life of physical work and whatever other things his history involved had produced, lean and capable in the way that did not announce itself and was considerably more present than she had been prepared for given that she had only ever seen him in the jacket and the cargo pants and the general armoring of a person who was always slightly on duty.
She looked at the emitters.
She was not going to make anything of this. She had put what she felt about Zedd in a place and it had been staying there reasonably well and this particular situation was not going to be the thing that moved it because she was not the kind of person who let circumstances make decisions that her judgment had already made. She was simply going to sit here for two hours and have a reasonable conversation and not examine too closely the specific distance between the two benches or the specific quality of the light in this particular room.
She looked at her hands.
"Comfortable?" she said, because something had to be said and that was a reasonable thing to say.
"Fine," he said, from the direction of the emitters. "You?"
"Fine," she said.
A pause settled between them that had a texture to it that was different from their usual silences. Their usual silences were easy and undemanding. This one was aware of itself in a way that their usual silences were not and both of them knew it and neither of them addressed it directly because addressing it directly would have required acknowledging what was causing it.
"How long have we been in here," Lindsy said.
He checked his wrist chrono, which was the one item T'Vara had confirmed did not need to go in the drawer. "Eleven minutes."
"One hundred and nine to go," she said.
"Give or take," he agreed.
He looked at her then, properly, because she had told him he could and because looking at the ceiling for one hundred and nine minutes was not sustainable and because he was not actually the kind of person who pretended things were not what they were. She met his gaze with the even quality she brought to most things and he held it and the chamber was quiet enough that the hum of the ship through the wall was the only sound available and neither of them filled that sound with anything for a moment.
She had brown eyes that in the white light of the chamber had a warmth to them that the bridge lighting and the astrometrics alcove never quite showed the same way. He had noticed her eyes before in the professional sense of having registered that they were brown and observant and generally pointed at something worth looking at. He had not noticed them in this specific way before and he noted the distinction and filed it in the same category as everything else he was filing.
"Tell me something," he said. "Something that has nothing to do with the ship or the tokens or the sensor array."
She looked at him across the small space between the benches and the space was small enough that looking across it felt different from looking across a room. "I was afraid of open water when I was young," she said. "Not space. Water. Rigel IV has significant ocean coverage and we lived near the coast and I refused to go in past my knees for three years."
"What changed it."
"My grandmother," she said. "She walked me in to my waist and held on and told me to look at the horizon rather than at the water. She said the fear lived in looking down." She paused. "I have thought about that more than once since I started working routes that most navigators avoid."