Farah stared at the briefing summary on the padd and tried to push the amber overlay into focus.
He was in prep room 4-C, standing beside Petty Officer Renn a contact specialist whose baseline expression suggested she’d worked with junior officers before and expected nothing and the briefing was due in twenty minutes.
Straightforward content: a diplomatic summary for a first-contact scenario the Enterprise wouldn’t reach for another six weeks.
His division officer, Lieutenant zh’Vrel, wanted it flawless because Commander Adewale would review it, and a junior officer’s first review was a door that opened once.
Farah had the facts.
He’d read the file twice.
But he lacked the feel of it the register, the weight zh’Vrel wanted on each point and the old reflex said: read the room, and you’ll know.
So he tried.
Renn stood half-turned from him line of her shoulders neutral, mouth set and Farah reached for the amber overlay like reaching for a name caught on the edge of memory.
Nothing came.
He tried again.
Slower.
Attention settled on her as it had settled, unbidden, on the official at the reception two nights ago.
He watched for the want underneath the surface, the irritation or boredom she was managing.
The overlay stayed dark.
Renn glanced at him, her expression flat and politely confused, and returned to her own padd.
Farah turned back to his padd and felt something under his ribs go cold.
He told himself it was frustration.
A tool he didn’t understand yet.
He pulled up the next section of the briefing and made three small edits his division officer had noted, then glanced at Renn again and tried a third time.
This time he stopped reaching.
Watched.
The way he used to watch a negotiator across a table, before the gift, when reading someone was work and attention and the slow accumulation of tells.
Renn wanted to finish the prep without her new ensign staring at her.
That much was legible without the overlay.
Competent, unworried, tired in the low-grade way everyone on a starship got tired by mid-shift.
And the amber stayed dark, because he couldn’t force it, and the cold knot below his breastbone settled lower and refused to be frustration.
It had heft.
Smooth, dense, familiar.
He’d carried it before.
Farah set the padd down carefully and made himself breathe past it.
The weight didn’t move.
It sat under the breath, old as a scar, and for half a second he felt the edge of a face not Renn’s, not his own, someone farther back and colder and he let it go before it finished surfacing.
Not here.
Not now.
“Ensign?”
Renn was looking at him.
Farah met her eyes and his voice came out steady.
“Just running section two again.
I’m good.”
She studied him for one beat, decided he wasn’t her problem.
“zh’Vrel wants the tone formal but accessible.
You’ve got it too stiff in section two.”
Farah pulled the section up and made the correction she was right about.
The tightness in his chest stayed exactly where it was.
The door opened.
Commander Adewale stepped in early twelve minutes early, which was either a test or a coincidence Farah couldn’t afford to bet on and zh’Vrel straightened like a wire pulled taut.
Farah rose.
Renn rose.
The commander’s gaze swept the room once, settled on Farah, and the Read came.
Unbidden.
Perfect.
At the worst possible second.
The overlay lit amber in the left edge of his sight, clean and small and specific as a diagnostic.
READ · WANT: to see whether the new one folds or holds under an early arrival.
The panel hung for two seconds, then faded.
Farah didn’t let his face move.
Something cold twisted once behind his sternum, hard, and he understood in the bitter certainty of a lesson learned twice that the gift he couldn’t summon would arrive exactly when it could ruin him.
Or save him.
He couldn’t tell which yet.
Commander Adewale smiled pleasant, unhurried, weighing him behind it.
“Ensign Farah.
Your division officer speaks well of your prep work.
Let’s see it.”
Farah picked up the padd.
His hands were steady.
The Read had told him what she wanted to see whether he’d fold and the answer to that want was simple.
He wouldn’t.
He walked her through the briefing.
Formal but accessible, following Renn’s correction.
No rushing.
No filling silence.
When Adewale asked a question about the cultural context of the target species’ greeting protocols, he answered it clearly and stopped, and held what he actually knew about her behind his teeth, where it belonged.
Adewale nodded twice.
Made one note.
At the end, her chin lifted measured approval, a superior confirming a junior officer had done the minimum necessary thing well.
That was all she’d come to see.
“Good work, Ensign.
Clean, thorough.
I’ll expect the same consistency going forward.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She turned to the lieutenant, made a brief comment too low for Farah to catch, and left.
The room exhaled.
zh’Vrel studied Farah, and Farah caught the faint surprise under the approval she’d expected competence, not polish but all she said was, “Well done.
Dismissed.”
Farah dipped his chin.
Renn gave him a look that might have been respect or might have been the same mild confusion she’d worn all shift.
He picked up his padd and walked out into the corridor, and the ache followed him like a bruise pressed against every rib.
He made it to the turbolift before he had to stop.
He stood in the empty lift, one hand flat against the wall, and let it land a whole shift’s held tension arriving at once.
Guilt, mostly: surfaced when he’d reached for the overlay and failed, surfaced again when it fired unbidden and he’d used every pixel of it.
It wasn’t new.
That was the worst part.
He’d felt it before in another life, in another room, the last time he’d understood someone completely and moved them where they should be and learned, too late, what that certainty cost.
It sat at the back of his throat, named and unspeakable.
He swallowed against it.
Not aloud, not even silently.
He held the silence like a breath drawn too deep to release, and he made himself stand still until the turbolift doors opened on Deck 3 and he could walk again.
His quarters were quiet.
He sat down in the chair that still wasn’t his and pulled up the duty roster for tomorrow, because there was always a tomorrow and it always required preparation.
None of it lifted.
He’d hoped allowed himself, for about a day, to hope that the overlay was a skill with rules, something he could call up when it mattered and shut off when it didn’t.
It wasn’t.
The Charter answered when it chose, on its own clock, and the ache under his sternum wasn’t even the gift’s doing.
Older than the overlay.
Older than the uniform.
He had always known how to see into a person and decide what they should do, and that instinct had followed him across a life he couldn’t return to and into a body that wasn’t born his.
He sat with it, arms folded, jaw loose, breathing steady.
Composed.
Tactical.
A listener who’d learned, once, to stop speaking.
Tomorrow he’d deliver another briefing.
The commander would expect consistency.
His division officer would expect the same thorough work.
And the amber would flare or it wouldn’t on a schedule he didn’t control, showing him wants he had no right to see and every reason to use.
Farah closed the roster and sat in the low light of quarters that belonged to someone who’d never carried what he carried.
The cold stayed exactly where it was.