He was as good-looking as she remembered, unruly brown hair curling down the back of his neck and touching his collar. He wore a purple compression shirt that went well with his green eyes. The formfitting top accentuated the fact that he was in very good shape. Just as she had done three months ago, she briefly wondered if the police had sent him to question her specifically because he was young and handsome. For a moment, the low-grade paranoia programmed into her since childhood made her suspect that he was here on purpose again, that this was a setup to get more information out of her in an informal setting, but then she dismissed the thought as illogical. He had been here first, and he’d had no way of knowing she would step out for dinner tonight at this exact time and choose this place out of a hundred other options on this street.
He nodded at her food container.
“I hadn’t marked you for someone who likes spicy food,” he said. “What grade is that?”
“Five,” she said. “I’m still working my way up the scale. Yours?”
“Eight. Sometimes nine if I feel daring.” He smiled at the little wince she gave him. “I have to eat out because the smell annoys the other detectives when I bring Acheroni food back to the office. They all have solid, traditional Gretian palates.”
“Starches, dairy, and meat proteins,” Solveig said. “Salt and sugar and maybe a little pepper.”
“And gods forbid you use too much of that. They think soy sauce is spicy,” he said.
She couldn’t suppress a little laugh, and he smiled, obviously pleased to have gotten that reaction out of her.
“It must be busy for you, too, if you’re still out here at this hour,” she said.
“Tempers get shorter in the summer. People are outside more. And we just had the first socaball match of the season this afternoon. Thank the gods that Sandvik won. Whenever they lose, we get really busy.”
Solveig ate her meal deliberately, mindful of the potential for sauce splattering her clean blue suit. She wanted to be annoyed at the fact that she cared about not making a mess in front of Detective Berg. It meant acknowledging to herself that she found him attractive. But it was an unexpected and almost pleasant annoyance.
“What about you? Working late tonight?” he asked.
“I want to tell you I am so busy that I don’t have time for leisure. That I only go home to sleep. The sort of thing you’re supposed to say as a corporate executive.”
She looked around as if to make sure nobody was listening in, then lowered her voice a little to pretend she was sharing a secret.
“The truth is that the food in our executive kitchen is boring. So I sneak out for dinner sometimes.”
“You’re a vice president at Ragnar,” Berg said. “I’m sure they could make you whatever you told them.”
“That’s not a good use of executive power,” Solveig replied. “It’s not my personal kitchen. It’s the company kitchen. Besides, it’s a good excuse to get some fresh air.”
He nodded and took a few bites of his own food. She watched him pick up the glistening black noodles of his dish with the sticks, then expertly wind them into a ball before putting them into his mouth.
“Do you live in the city?” he asked.
Solveig shook her head.
“No, I’m staying at the family place. At least until I get a feel for this routine. I just started three months ago. I’m still trying to find the right rate of swing for this pendulum.”
“That’s a good way to put it,” he said. “I’m not sure I could move into the same place with my parents again. I was glad to be away. It’s nice to see them every few months, but we all do better when we have our own space. I barely spend time at home anyway. And when I do, it’s at the strangest hours. It would drive them crazy after a while.”
“Where do you live?”
“I have a place in the outer ring, near the spaceport. Sometimes I stay late, or I don’t want to deal with the tube travel, and then I just rent a sleeping pod in the city for the night.”
Solveig suddenly felt keenly aware of the gap in life circumstances that existed between her and almost everyone else who was close to her age. She had a company gyrofoil standing by to ferry her back home to sleep, to a huge family estate with a security detachment, dozens of rooms, and a fully staffed kitchen with its own vegetable gardens and fishponds. He had to take a long tube ride home because he couldn’t afford a place inside the main city ring, and when he stayed out in the city overnight, it was by necessity and not choice. Things that were adventures or acts of rebellion for her were just regular life for normal people.
“The investigation was a dead end, by the way,” he said around a mouthful of noodles.
“The investigation,” Solveig repeated.
“The one I helped conduct at Ragnar when I questioned you. Three months ago. The glove from Lagertha Land Systems. It was a dead end. In case you’re wondering if I’m just trying to get information out of you.”
“Oh. I figured you would have been by to ask more questions if it wasn’t resolved.”
“It was like you said. Lagertha closed down after the war, and the military records can’t tell us who received that glove.”
“So we are both just civilians right now,” she said.
“Off the clock and off the record,” he confirmed. “No legal or ethical pitfalls.”
They continued their meal. She kept sneaking glances at him when his attention was on his noodles to wind them up for another bite. Detective Berg’s brown hair was lightly curled, and it looked a little too unruly for a police officer. She suspected he got a lot of comments about it at
