The door opened and someone walked in, and it was not Leia.

The footsteps that followed carried a different rhythm from Leia’s, lighter and quicker, the kind of walk that landed where it landed without spending much thought on the precise placement of each step. Zaeryn stayed where he was on the rug, one arm folded behind his head, eyes half open and watching the angle of the ceiling rather than the door itself.

A woman came into view at the edge of his vision, and she made it perhaps three steps into the lounge before she registered him lying on the floor and stopped completely, as though the rug had become electrified beneath her feet.

She had short, fiery red hair, cut into an asymmetric crop with the longer side sweeping across her brow, and even from where he was lying down he could see the way her eyebrows drew together as she processed what she was looking at.

"Hey." Her voice arrived a few seconds after processing, her body had already stopped. "You’re not Leia."

"Correct." Zaeryn said, not turning to look at her fully.

"Who are you?"

Zaeryn pushed himself up onto his elbows, then sat up properly, taking his time about it because there was no particular reason to hurry. He brushed a hand through his hair to push it back out of his eyes and looked up at her with mild interest.

"Zaeryn," he said. "And I am going to take a wild guess and say you are one of Leia’s sisters."

Before she could answer, a second figure stepped through the door behind her and came to a halt at her side. This one arrived without making any kind of statement about it, hands tucked into the pockets of a cropped dark jacket, and she looked down at Zaeryn the way a person might look at a piece of furniture that had been rearranged without anyone consulting her about the matter.

Purple hair, cut at a sharp angle along her jaw. Tattoos down her left arm in clean, deliberate lines. Amber eyes that moved over him once with the speed of someone cataloging something.

"I’m Rhenna," the redhead said.

Zaeryn nodded once.

Rhenna’s eyes narrowed faintly, and her head tilted to one side. For a moment she said nothing. Then her expression shifted as a memory found its place behind it, and she leaned forward by an inch.

"Hold on. I think I’ve seen you somewhere before. Not that long ago." She turned her head toward her companion without taking her eyes off Zaeryn. "Celestine. You remember this person, right?"

"I do." Celestine said with a faint amused look, but she offered nothing more.

Zaeryn raised an eyebrow.

"Really." He let the word hang there for a moment. "Unless Leia has been secretly keeping pictures of me and showing them around the house at family dinners, I genuinely do not see how either of you would recognize me. I am not exactly that famous."

The corner of Rhenna’s mouth twitched. "Not really. But I think we traveled together in a public cruiser," she said. "A few days back. You were heading into the Citadel district. Celestine and I were a few rows ahead of you."

Zaeryn went still for a moment as the memory came forward to meet him. The cruiser ride into the Citadel. He still didn’t remember seeing them, but it wasn’t like he was paying any attention to anyone at that time.

"Oh." He gave a slow nod. "Right. That actually makes a lot more sense now."

Rhenna watched him with an expression caught halfway between interest and confusion, and she leaned a little further forward in the chair.

"So. Are you a friend of Leia’s, or..."

She let the question trail off, as if the shape of the sentence had grown too strange to finish on its own.

"Not a friend," Zaeryn said. "Project partners. We go to the same academy."

The pause that followed was long enough to become its own kind of statement.

Rhenna’s eyes moved over him a second time, slower than the first.

"You go to the Warlady academy." Rhenna asked, her curiosity shooting up.

"I do." Zaeryn nodded. He could already anticipate even more questions from them.

"How is that even possible?" Rhenna’s voice had dropped into something closer to genuine puzzlement. "You’re a male."

Zaeryn had answered this question enough times by now to have a polished version of the answer sitting ready at the front of his mind.

"The Citadel placed me there." He said it in the same tone another person might use to mention the weather. "Special circumstances. I do not really have a tidier answer than that one, and to be honest with you, I asked the same question myself for about a few days. Nobody has sent me the formal explanation in writing yet, but I imagine that somewhere in a sealed file the reasoning is very impressive."

"He’s lying," Finally the other person, Celestine said, her expression still amused. "Are you even a real person?" She asked.

"Last time I checked." Zaeryn said. What a weird question to ask. Not really. This wasn’t the first time someone said something like that.

"Hmm, I doubt that." Celestine said.

"I agree with her. Are you sure you’re not lab made?" Rhena asked, her question was half a joke and half a genuine question.

"He’s not lab made. I checked." Leia stepped into the room without breaking stride. "He’s the natural variety. Which is worse." 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ𝑤𝑒𝑏𝑛𝘰𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝒸𝑜𝘮

Zaeryn looked over at her, she was carrying a chilled drink in her hands with a straw.

Zaeryn noticed that she didn’t bring him a drink despite asking her to do so.

"Hey where is my drink?" He asked.

Leia tapped at the console and pulled up a new file. "You have legs. Go get it yourself." She said.

"Rhenna." Leia spoke without turning from the console. "Out. We have work to do."

Rhenna looked at her sister, as if she was about to say something and then she looked down at Zaeryn.

"It was nice meeting you, Zaeryn."

"Likewise."

She stepped past Leia and headed for the door, and Celestine, who had been standing in the same spot the entire time, fell into step behind her in silence.

The door slid shut behind them.

"That’s your sister." Zaeryn said. "I like her. She seems nice,"

"Of course you would like her. You three would get along. They are both wired to treat anything that matters like an inconvenience. And you?"

"What about me?" Zaeryn asked.

"You should know what’s wrong with you," she said, and then looked up at him, "The fact that you seem to not know is what’s concerning," with that she looked back down on the research.

Her words made Zaeryn think for a second. "Only you seem to think that. So I don’t think there is anything wrong with me," he said.

While he was an anomaly, that didn’t mean he was broken, and the two were not the same word no matter how often the people in this world fell into the habit of using them as though they were.

He had spent enough time by now turning that particular distinction over in his head to feel relatively settled on it, even on the days when people like Leia or Kayla sharpened their version of the conflation into something closer to a verdict.

Anomaly meant outside the expected pattern, while broken meant something that had stopped working the way it was supposed to, and he worked perfectly well, and had always worked perfectly well, regardless of how the rest of the world preferred to categorize him.

Whatever she had decided was wrong with him, he was reasonably confident that it could not be that.

What he was less confident about was whether she had been pointing at his anomaly status at all when she said it, because she had not actually named the thing.

She had simply told him that the not knowing was the concerning part, and then let the silence handle the rest of the work on her behalf.

The vagueness was the entire weapon, and the vagueness was what made him sit with the accusation instead of dismissing it outright, and the fact that he had now paused this long to think about it in the first place was almost certainly exactly what she had been counting on when she chose to phrase it the way she did.

He let the thought settle and reached for his own console.

After a minute his wrist comm chimed at his side with a single soft tone. He glanced at the small display. He had set the reminder to remind him to start training.

"Right." He pushed himself up off the rug and worked the small stiffness out of his shoulders from having been lying there for the better part of the afternoon. "We should stop here for today, I have other things to do."

He did not wait to see whether she agreed. He was already taking his first step toward the door before any reply had a chance to arrive.

Leia’s hand stopped moving across the device in her hands. She looked up at him, "Wait, we are not done." She demanded.