Osei stood his watch outside Venemis's door in the particular unhurried stillness he brought to every duty he'd ever drawn, and it was Alita, passing through the corridor on her way back from the archive at an hour considerably later than she'd meant to still be awake, who stopped, unprompted, and settled against the bulkhead across from him instead of simply passing by.
"You don't have to keep me company," Osei said, without turning his head, his eyes still tracking the length of the empty corridor with the same patient thoroughness he brought to everything. "I've stood longer watches than this one with considerably worse company than my own thoughts."
"I know," Alita said. "I wanted to anyway. I've realized, these last few weeks, that I know almost nothing about you beyond the fact that you're extremely good at your job and unfailingly polite about it, which is a strange thing to realize about a man who's stood between me and several different kinds of danger this month."
Osei was quiet a moment, the particular quiet of a man deciding how much of himself was worth handing to someone who'd asked honestly rather than out of idle curiosity, and when he spoke, his voice had lost a little of its usual flatness. "I was taken once," he said, "a long time before this ship. Independent courier work, the kind that doesn't ask too many questions about cargo as long as the pay clears. A crew I was running with got boarded by a syndicate outfit looking to make an example, and I was the one they decided to keep, because I was the one who'd talked the least during the boarding and they judged, wrongly as it turned out, that quiet meant valuable."
"What happened," Alita asked, careful, folding her arms against the corridor's low chill.
"I got out," Osei said, simply. "Took eleven days, and I won't pretend the details are pleasant enough to be worth telling at this hour, but I got out, on my own, without anyone coming to look for me, because nobody in that life had any particular reason to look. I've thought about it more since I came aboard this ship than I thought about it in the several years before, mostly because I've noticed, watching this crew, that you'd all come looking. I'm not certain what to do with that, if I'm honest. It's an unfamiliar feeling, being worth the looking."
"How did you get out," Alita asked, gently, when he didn't offer it on his own.
Osei was quiet a moment longer, his gaze still fixed on the corridor's far end. "Patiently," he said, finally. "I counted their rotations for six days before I moved once. I learned which guard fell asleep at which hour, and which one talked too much to the others about a debt he owed somewhere he shouldn't have owed it. On the seventh day I used the second thing to buy myself thirty seconds of the first, and thirty seconds was enough, if you know exactly what to do with them and you've spent six days making certain you do." He glanced at her, briefly, something almost wry moving at the corner of his mouth. "It taught me most of what I know about reading a room before I act in it, Lieutenant. I don't recommend the tuition. I don't regret having paid it, either."
Alita held his gaze a moment, something in her chest going quietly tight at the plain, unguarded weight of it, and found she didn't have a response ready that felt equal to what he'd just handed her. "We would," she said finally, simply. "For what it's worth."
"I believe you," Osei said, and something almost like a smile moved briefly at the corner of his mouth before the watch's usual stillness settled back over him. "That's a newer feeling than you'd think, Lieutenant, at my age."
A dispatch chimed softly on the corridor's small relay terminal a few minutes later, routed the long way through three separate stations, standard for anything reaching the Arctic out here, and Alita crossed to read it while Osei kept his post, her face tightening slightly as she scanned the short administrative burst.
"Sahir council business," she said. "Delayed almost two weeks in the routing. Matriarch Ness's Raider fleet's grown bold enough that Simika's stopped merely disapproving of it in private and started contesting it openly in council instead. There's a formal vote scheduled, first time in longer than the record shows, on whether to fund Ness's buildup as a sanctioned defense measure or condemn it outright as the private army everyone already knows it is." She set the terminal down, something tired moving across her face. "It's strange, hearing about a fight happening at home while we're out here having entirely different ones. The whole world doesn't stop just because we're not standing in it."
"It rarely does," Osei said, "which I've always found is the thing people forget first, the longer they're away from anywhere they'd call home. My own people used to say the desert keeps its own count of days whether or not you're there to mark them. I didn't understand it as a child. I understand it a great deal better now."
Camaro found him there twenty minutes after Alita had gone, drawn as much by habit as by anything specific, the two of them having fallen, across the last week of the crossing, into the quiet rhythm of an evening spar in the narrow corridor outside the cargo bay, her still-healing hand wrapped carefully and held close, his own stance patient and unhurried, the same stillness he brought to every duty he'd ever drawn.
"No sparring tonight," she said, before he could offer. "I came to ask you something instead, and I've been putting it off for three days because I wasn't certain I wanted the answer."
"Ask it," Osei said.
"Why do you always take point," Camaro said. "Every time. The listening post, the ambush at the belt, the fight outside Venemis's cell that first week. You could let someone else eat the first contact once in a while. Nobody would think less of you for it."
Osei considered the question a long moment, his eyes still on the empty corridor's far end, and when he answered, his voice had gone quieter than she'd heard it before. "Because I've watched what happens to a crew when the person taking point isn't the one most prepared to lose something," he said. "You've all got families waiting somewhere, Ensign, or the shape of one you're still building. Swan's got a mother on Terrenus. Alita's got a father she's still fighting to bring home. I don't have anyone waiting for a message that says I didn't come back. That's not a small thing to carry into a fight. It's the one advantage I actually have over the rest of you, and I've never seen the sense in not using it."
Camaro was quiet a long moment, something in her chest going tight and unfamiliar at the plain, unhurried honesty of it. "That's a lonely reason to volunteer for the worst job on the ship," she said, finally.
"Maybe," Osei said. "It's also, in my experience, the only reason that's ever actually true when someone gives it. Most people who take point tell you it's duty, or courage, or the job. It's usually simpler than that. It's usually just that somebody has to be the one with the least left to lose, and most nights, that's me." He looked at her then, something almost gentle in it. "Get some rest, Ensign. That hand of yours won't finish healing on a schedule you're trying to outwork."