Carson Blake Lindauer

You are in Mauricio's body at the desk, and the moustache itches in the lamplight. Twenty-one, skinny, a student's wrists. You have been him for less than a minute, and already you know he is the wrong size for what you want. The thin chest, the quiet. Something he could not do is sitting in his throat: a sentence in a language he half owns, which he kept reaching for and could not close his hand on. You do not say the reason aloud. You press the key.

Then the floor is steel, and the light is wrong, and your hands are full of cold.

A chain. Links run through your fingers, wet with the night air, heavy as a sentence. The deck hums under your boots. Past the open edge of the hangar the dark is total, with one far scatter of lights. A jet sits chained down at your left shoulder. Your hands were mid-motion, and one of them has done something wrong. You see it. You undo it and do it again, slowly, correctly.

The coverall comes first. It is stiff navy cotton, and the cuffs rub your wrists. The memory is his, not yours: this morning, a rack, a thin mattress, one boot lace pulled too tight. He zipped the coverall from the crotch to the collar with the same two fingers he always uses. He put the flashlight in the left pocket, and your chest knows its weight. He did it half asleep and happy, because last night his boyfriend sent him a picture of a dog that is not theirs, just a dog, and he had laughed alone in the dark so quietly that nobody woke.

You test the next link. The chain bites your calluses and the memory opens: a gravel yard in Phoenix, afternoon so white it hurt, saguaros standing like men with their hands up. He is sixteen and sweating through a T-shirt, and he wants only to be somewhere with a horizon that moves. The money is there too, strangely, a number tucked behind his ribs like a folded note: more than a kid like him should be able to say out loud. He has told no one on this ship.

Your jaw tastes of mint and a nicotine pouch, tucked in the gum, and the buzz is a low hum. Under that is last night's drink, the dull headache, the thirst. He drinks the way the others do, past the point of pleasure, because it makes the hours go by. Your back aches from bending. The legs are long and strong. Six feet of boy, nineteen years, and every joint still believes it is invincible.

The ten links that follow, you check, each one. His body does not need it. Yours does.

You look at your hands, turn them over, the knuckles raw and the fingers steady. Then you lift your eyes.

"Okay," you say, quietly. "Okay. Hello."

Underneath it the question is already there, patient as the sea: how long.