Chapter 16: Doss Notices Without Asking

The barracks maintenance cycle ran on the second and fourth Thursdays of each month. Kael had been cleared to participate by the garrison duty officer three weeks into his Bureau posting — a small administrative accommodation that preserved his unit registration and kept the garrison quarter's equipment manifest complete. He arrived at 1930 precisely, signed the maintenance log with his designation number, and took his assigned station at the secondary locker row.

Doss was already there.

He was working the third locker from the left, checking the seal compression on the lower latch with the practiced efficiency of a man who has run the same check several hundred times. His hands moved without consulting his eyes. He had a small torque gauge in his left breast pocket and he removed it, applied it, read it, replaced it, all in one motion that had long since stopped being a sequence of steps.