By the time we get back, we’re all hungry again, and my fingers are itching to do something productive and concrete. It’s late, too, late by all of our standards, but for all that we’re exhausted, we don’t head to our rooms, and instead mill about in the common space in a dynamic I’m actually familiar with.

“Would you believe me if I said that we have a specific traditional recipe for nights like this?”

“If you were anyone else, my lord, I shouldn’t.”

Amber’s smirk gleams at me, and I grin back at her, and keep rummaging in the kitchen. “Actually, it’s two recipes. The soup, we make in enormous lots whenever we start running low, which is about twice every three months.” I pause in my rummaging, a heavy pot in my hands, and put it down carefully. It still makes something of a thump, “Made. Started to. Was.”

There’s a hand on my shoulder, and Amber wraps her other arm around me after I start leaning back into it. “Month, rather than some two-and-a-half megaseconds?” The comment comes from what feels like a pretty sizeable distance, and after a bit of a pause.

“Well, I mean, I usually…” I pause, collecting my words a little more coherently. “The kitchens have extremely strong traditions. I didn’t really pick them up on my round-the-world—” I catch her quizzical, tolerantly baffled quirk of an eyebrow, and stop myself. “Everyone starts with the six standard rotations, one interval per job, to learn the ‘ship—the World—and see where we fit in. Kitchen’s one of them, or at least it counts for food, which is everything after harvest; the others, there’s crops, water, air, engineering, and creche. Anyway, I did a second interval in the kitchen and then just kept helping out every now and then, so I picked up more than a few habits of thought. So now, when I cook or do any kitchen stuff, I tend to think in Standard instead of Epochal; so weeks and months, not megaseconds.”

She nods, chin resting on the top of my head. “So, the soup, you made in enormous lots.”

I snicker at the obvious attempt to rerail the conversation and get me back on task. “Yeah. It was basically a staple, we always had some around. The sandwiches we would cook up on request. Someone would come by and we’d fry them up and send them on their way with a block’s worth of a late night meal, with an exhortation to bring the dishes back well before breakfast.” I pry myself out of her arms, away from the softness of her curves and the rippling safety of her muscles. “We’ll do the soup first. I need a pot that’ll do seventy-five kilopascals and one-eighteen degrees, just over boiling.”

“That’s two-forty in vulgars. Here!” Vonne squats down to grab a pot out of one of the cabinets, placed seemingly arbitrarily in the nigh-endless expanse of them. It hits the counter with a heavy thunk. “The kitchens are all laid out the same. You tell me what you need, and I’ll get it for you!”

“A quarter liter of water, the same of crushed or diced tomatoes. I’ve already got the onion. Something with some extra fat content that will decohere into the soup, I don’t actually remember what the margarine we used was made out of. Salt, pepper, and…” I frown in thought, because while I did know this cold once upon a time, it’s been a while. “Oregano and rosemary? Do you have those?”

“The Magelord surely jests, should he not add basil to such a soup.”

“Basil.” I exhale. “Huh. I forgot about basil. The old recipe calls for it, yeah, but we… y’know, a lot of herbs didn’t make the transition, it wasn’t just cherries. As far as I’m aware, basil didn’t exist anymore, even if we kept the old recipe around as a reminder. Basil, thyme, marjoram.”

“We have all three of those! Also oregano and rosemary. Mama Vix brought what she says was almost every herb and spice on Cador, and she would know, and now the Temple has those for, well, templates? And um. Maybe chicken broth instead of water?”

“Um. Sure.” I shove aside the spike of hurt and anger that rises from that and keep working. I already have a knife, so it’s only the work of a moment to strip the skin off the onion and quarter it, and that helps me get re-centered, since there’s only one acceptable mental state for knife-work. The onion goes into the pot along with the ingredients Vonne and Amber bring me—the tomatoes turn out to be smashed, not crushed or diced, but it doesn’t matter, and we use butter instead of vegetable oil, fine—and I put two fingers on the interface of the pot and make a spinning motion, then an in-and-out motion. Dissatisfied, I flare my Skills and interface the Visor with the pot in lieu of figuring out how I’m actually supposed to use it; it’s the work of a couple seconds, having done so, to set it to the appropriate temperature and pressure and set it to run for seventeen minutes.

“When that’s finished, we’ll use whatever you’ve got in the way of an immersion blender to turn it into a homogeneous soup, but for the other key component of the meal…” I hum to myself, hands on my hips, leaning back in a stretch. “Okay. Grab me that double-long pan with the raised edges you used for the pancakes? And some… some more butter, I guess, that worked well, and you don’t have the other kind of oil, either.” I touch the edges of my finger to the edges of the glowing rectangle on the cooktop and slide outwards, then put the pan on top. The rectangle shrinks back down to bare visibility around the edges of the pan, and I spin a dial back and forth. “Just enough heat, not a whole lot. We want this to take about five minutes on each side to brown the bread. Cheese? Sharp, but without too much tang, melts well but not faster than the bread will brown?”

“Was my lord not entirely unfamiliar with milk?”

I cough awkwardly at Amber’s arched eyebrow. “We didn’t really drink milk? On the Spirit, or really any of the Fleet. It’s… I don’t know if it’s too much more efficient to make cheese and yogurt and then… I think we used the whey for fertilizer? Anyway, I wasn’t exactly in my right mind, you know what I mean?” I shrug, trying to turn it into a joke for all its seriousness. “I mean, we had goats. Technically they’re not even part of ag, they’re… air, if I remember right. I dunno, I was allergic, so it’s not like I had anything to do with them. We just didn’t drink milk.”

“Air?”

“Yeah, air covers parks, among other things, and the green-grass parks get goats. It’s just a quirk of organization, I guess.”

“Cheese!”

Vonne’s voice rings out from behind me and to the right. I blink a few times, getting my brain back on track. “Cheese,” I say to Vonne in somber agreement. “For reference, more specifically?”

“Cheddared cow-milk. Rennet and salt, bitter peptides?” She giggles at something that I would assume to be my expression if she weren’t behind me, though maybe I’m reflecting off of something. “You’re gonna melt the cheese onto the bread while you cook it, right? This’ll work.”

“I need a cover for the pan.” I do, but also it’s something I can say to move on from the awkwardness I’m feeling again. The pan goes almost instantly to the heat I set it to, fast even by the standards of a range with ultra-highs for the solenoids, and the handle stays cool to the touch despite looking like it’s one seamless piece of metal with the pan; a nice trick, that. “I need to slice—”

“This is the objectively correct thickness for your purposes.” Sara interrupts me for what might have been the first time ever, handing me a platter piled high with sliced pieces of bread. I gawp at her, and then see that she’s got something shockingly similar to a smile on her face, and I look at the bread again.

It really is the perfect thickness.

“Yeah.” I nod at her, suppressing the urge to laugh. “It really is. Alright. Butter goes in the pan.”

“How much?”

“Enough to get decent coverage; we’re using the butter in the pan to coat the bread, basically.” I nod as Vonne passes the butter over the slicing area that I’d completely forgotten about when it came time to do the onion, and the butter falls apart into thin slices that she tosses into the pan. “Thicker slices than that for the cheese. We’re gonna make sandwiches, cover the pan, flip them in five minutes.”

By the time I’ve figured out how Vonne’s changed the settings on the slicing surface—there are three dials and a bunch of miscellaneous settings, all of them built into the surface, because whatever the surface does it only does to food and not people, somehow—that’s all done and the cheese sandwiches are on the pan with the cover over them.

“We ate a lot of soup,” I say by way of partial explanation to a half-heard question. “There are, um, I guess it depends on how you define bread and where you draw the line of bread-families, but maybe seventeen different kinds of bread that were made at some refectory or another on the Spirit. A lot more different kinds of soup than that, but the idea was always that the soup or stew is your non-carbohydrate intake, it’s got most of your proteins and fats and vitamins, and then you use the soup as a vehicle and for texture because the soup’s homogeneous.”

“Without such herbs as we used, but with bread in plenty?”

“We had wheat and corn. Well, wheats, I guess? I don’t actually know the taxonomy of rye and barley.” I catch myself frowning absently at the pan as though I’ll be able to see how it’s cooking without lifting the lid, as though I’m going to do so before the timer goes off. I close my eyes instead, leaning back into Amber as she wraps one arm around me to stabilize me. “And potatoes, and onions, and garlic. Tomatoes, at least seven kinds of mint. It’s not like we didn’t have any variety; we just ate a lot of soup on purpose.”

There’s laughter at that, which I had mostly intended. The conversation shifts, and I let it, listening to Amber tell a story of when she was a teenager and still adapting to life in the Temple Lands. She wraps up her story around when it’s time to flip the sandwiches, and there’s a pause while everyone lets me inspect the melting rates of the cheese and how browned the bread is. We got the temperature and time pretty close to right, and once I pronounce that with the appropriate level of over-seriousness, they take over flipping the bread and making tiny adjustments to the cooking, and I drift over to the stools by the long islands that serve as both in-kitchen seating and prep area.

Sara, of all people, picks up with the next story, recounting in dust-dry tones the absurdism of a social challenge that she’d taken on with Rei’s team, a challenge that had included fitting into and performing alongside a comedy troupe specializing in physical comedy of various sorts. We’re all snickering by ten seconds in and howling in laughter by the end, and she’s unbent enough to have actual body language and do a credible imitation of Rei’s tone of voice at his most unctuous.

Zidanya tells a story about Arcadia, about towering trees that would shift their branches so you could run along them across entire forests. If they liked you enough, she claims, they’d even shift back to stymie anyone trying to follow you. It’s a haunting story, a story of youthful indiscretions and adventures shadowed by the fact that those forests have been gone for a couple thousand years, and we eat while she tells it, which somehow feels right.

That sets me off laughing, and I don’t really have a way to explain why, but I try, and the others just accept it even if they don’t understand it. It’s the spoon-state, where you’re tired enough to find just the word spoon itself funny if someone says it at you, and they don’t understand that either, but Amber tries it out and finds it to be true enough.

None of us wants to be the one to call it a night.

We eat the soup and sandwiches, savoring the texture contrast and the warmth, and I praise the difference in the soup and try to keep that all that’s showing on my face. Amber pulls me onto the couch, head on her lap as she plays with my hair, and Zidanya settles on the other side of her, back leaning against her in a sort of dynamic equilibrium. Vonne wraps a couple of tails around my legs in a sort of hug, and I have no idea where Sara is or what she’s doing, but I just lie there listening to the stories as they fade into a background murmur.

I drift off to sleep with a quiet mind and a small smile, contented.

Safe.