Olly and Jack

“One and two veg.”

“Two and three veg.”

“One and two, please, thank you.”

“Just soup, sorry, stomach’s not—”

“One and two veg.”

The Placeholder isn't really big enough that you can get away with pretending like you've always been there, but Olly hates being the new girl no matter the arena, and so she’s hovering near the end of the mess hall line, a somewhat studied quality to her casual slouch, wordlessly practicing the delivery — either the brisk, no-nonsense “One and two veg” or the more personable “One and two, cheers” — in her head.

It starts great: her voice doesn’t even shake! She sounds like she’s been ordering one serving of protein with two servings of vegetables all her life.

It doesn’t end great: yeah, her voice doesn’t shake, but it does trail off into nothing, words dying unspoken on her lips, as she tosses her shaggy blond bangs away out of her face and her gaze settles on a pair of eyes just like her own.


Eyes the color of Shaddai malachite; eyes the color of the bioluminescent creatures who live on the underside of deep ocean rocks. Olly had almost forgotten all the crap people used to say. Just because they had really vividly green eyes. Actually, no: just because they had really vividly green eyes and their parents had no money.

“Olivia?”

The man on the other side of the counter — one hand on Olly’s proffered metal tray and another curled around the slim neck of a ladle -- how long has it been since she’s seen him? How long ago was it that their life together was rent down the middle with all the lack of fanfare of a wet sheet of paper ripped noiselessly in two? The man with Olly’s malachite eyes; the man with Olly’s same shock of straw blond hair but corralled into a neater cut; the man who looks somehow so much like home that it cuts Olly’s breath straight from her chest, because she didn’t even know home was a thing anymore, she didn’t even know anything like it could exist, or could be missed, and, and—

“Olly,” Olly says, because ‘Olivia’ was certainly a while ago, at any rate. Everything else, she tries to button up, toss aside: every other question, accusation, exhalation. “Jacob. I didn’t really…”

Her words die off again. Fair enough, this time; it’s not like she could have practiced for this one. At least there’s no one behind her in line, since she’d idled so long trying to get the intonation for her order right. They stare at each other; her heart is an open wound, somehow, and it’s odd, because she wasn’t even all that aware that she had a heart. Not one that got involved in family matters, anyway.

Jacob never was the most talkative among them, so Olly tries to pick up that slack, too — she imagines lining up with her siblings and little nieces and nephews and cousins, a whole stack of Gryantes, as they try to slot themselves back into their old roles, trying to squeeze her feet into ghostly little girl shoes a million sizes too small.

“Your culinary ambitions didn't take you further than to become a line cook, huh?” she says, jokes, she’s trying to be funny, even a little cute, but maybe she just sounds rude. “Didn’t take you all the way to the drive-in, I mean.”

Jacob looks back at her kind of blankly, not even squinting — with a pang, she realizes he doesn’t remember. “Oh, I don’t always work the mess hall,” he says after a few way-too-long, way-too-much moments of silence, failing to grasp the hook she’s slung out.

Not that it’s much of a hook, exactly, just a game they used to have when they were kids, pretending at working the BurgerZone Drive-Thru, her talking up the car she was going to get when she was rich, him talking up all the restaurants he was going to own…


Jacob continues, “We take food duty in turns. Tomorrow, I’m on repair duty. Wednesdays, I get to help out in the medical bay. Doc Thereas taught me how to put in stitches.”

That’s what makes him proud these days, Olly manages to think, that’s what drives him: some doctor letting him stitch people up. Perhaps she should have known the BurgerZone Drive-Thru wouldn’t have staying power, but there’s something almost fascinatingly painful about realizing that the tiny thing she's been remembering him by for all these years is nothing to him. Not even an inside joke.

A million questions, unasked, zip between them, or at least zip from Olly to Jacob: Where's Portia? What happened to mom? Why didn't you try to find me after the Crush?

But there’s not really enough time to talk about it. Or maybe enough time, but, like… not enough space. Not enough air, almost. She takes the tray from her older brother.

“Olivia?” he says again; she doesn’t respond and, to his credit, he quickly course corrects. “Sorry. Olly.”

“What?”

“How come you’re here? On the Placeholder.”

She wrangles herself into submission, voice and spine and all: “We can talk about that later. Gotta go. My one-and-two’s growing cold.”

It’s easy enough to forget, to elide, to store it for safe-keeping, to not think about it. When she slips into a seat next to the loudest crew member she can find; when that crew member laughs raucously and throws his arm around her shoulders, gives them a shake, introduces her as his new piece of ass; when she gives as good as she gets by waggling her eyebrows ostentatiously at him before leaning forward, quick as a Tandor fox kit, piercing his best hunk of meat on her own fork and devouring it before his very eyes; it’s easy enough to deny, deny, deny. When everyone laughs, and someone high-fives her, and everyone grins at her, it’s easy enough to keep her mind from twisting and turning on the odds of it all, on the minute, bastard fucking minute odds that you’d run into your long-lost brother like this on a pirate ship, when the only way through, when the only way you goddamn well managed to survive was by imagining he’d been killed with all the rest of them. It dawns on her now that they might not even be dead, either. All those specters she’s conjured, all those ghosts she’s kept by her side all these years.

BurgerZone goddamn Drive-Thru.

She slings her eyes over to the counter, she can’t help herself, but it’s no longer lit up; Jacob’s done for the evening, she supposes.

It’s the only question she can’t quell, now, even with Loud-Mouth Thereas’s hand in her lap, the only thing she can’t quite manage to eject from her mind: Why didn’t you try to find me after the Crush?