Laura was lucky. Without her to guide the all-hands meeting to a swift conclusion, it would take the rest of the morning. She could remain in blissful ignorance of her new duties and concentrate on getting Koen into his room.

At the end of a corridor, in a nonhuman city, on an earth 500 million years distant from his, Koen found the door to his apartment. The industrial wood, metal, and plastic could have been Rotterdam.

"We'll take my thumb print off the whitelist once your quarantine is over," said Laura, pressing her thumb to the lock.

Koen looked at the door, resisting the urge to let his head fall against it.

His biocontainment suit clung to him like a plastic bag filled with old, damp parsnips. All he could smell was his own breath, recirculated endlessly back to him. The only thing keeping him upright was the thought of peeling this vile skin off and boiling himself in a shower. And then…and then two weeks of…

"Are you all right?" asked Laura.

"What?"

"You sort of jerked. Your fists clenched."

Koen looked down and found she was right. Clammy folds slid as he un-clenched his fingers. "Sorry," he said. "A hiccup."

Laura didn't believe him, but she wasn't ready to admit how upset it made her to see Koen so miserable. She reached for a justification, and found human resource management.

"Don't hide psychological symptoms," she told him. "The mental health of the staff here is just as important as the physical health."

Koen gave an exhausted smirk. "What'll you do if I go crazy? Lock me in my apartment for two weeks?"

"Don't joke. You know that the threat of cross-contamination of pathogens is real. Tell me what's wrong," Laura ordered.

Koen tensed up again, although he wasn't aware of it. He looked back at his door. How could he have fled so far and come back to the same place? He wanted to flee now, but couldn't because Laura was still looking up at him. He didn't consider telling her that he was remembering the Covid-19 Lockdown and his father's death. He didn't know that's what he was remembering.

"I'm just tired," he said. "Worried, I guess. Uh, not looking forward to another two weeks of quarantine."

"But this time we can talk to each-other. We can talk on the phone, I mean, in real time." Laura forced her mouth to shut before it could say, "I'll call you all the time for the next two weeks, I promise."

Was she giving an unfair amount of attention to the ambassador's chef because she was infatuated with him? She could answer that question easily: yes, she was. The more important question was who else knows?

Not Koen, apparently. He didn't respond to Laura's shameless invitation with "yes, my darling! Your emails kept me sane during the quarantine in China, and now only your voice can keep my soul alive. We'll start with romantic poetry, work our way up to phone sex, and by the time I'm out, we'll be ready for the real thing! You can get married over video-chat, right?"

"Ugh!" Koen said. "Two weeks." He cursed.

Laura, very un-flattered, was considering the merits of anger when Koen shuddered again.

"A shower," he muttered. "A hot shower."

Laura looked around at the translator bug clinging to her shoulder. It had reproduced Koen's voice so well that she had almost missed the fact that he wasn't speaking English. Koen had lapsed back into Dutch, talking to himself.

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Laura's face heated. She'd been keeping him from his shower, head so full of fluffy fantasy she couldn't see what was actually in front of her. "Sorry!" Selfish. Selfish!

"You go take your shower," she told him. "Relax." Laura pushed the door open.

Koen did not so much enter the apartment as collapse horizontally into it.

He brought himself up against the small dining table and swayed. He considered crawling on top of it and going to sleep.

All that prevented him from doing so was the thought of how his suit would squelch all the way up his chest.

Koen's hands scrabbled up to the back of his neck. They grabbed the air hose, squeezed, twisted. He tugged it lose, pawed at the zipper, yanked at it, and finally cool air touched his skin. The sweaty hairs on Koen's back stiffened. Gasping, groaning, Koen pulled the suit apart and freed his face.

Then it was off with the sleeves. They turned inside out in their desire to cling to him. Not like peeling a parsnip so much as skinning a rabbit. Koen tugged, and his legs came free.

The whole sodden, bio-hazardous bundle slumped to the floor. It was followed immediately by Koen's shirt, undershirt, pants, underwear…

He remembered to turn around and look to see that the door was closed.

It was, of course, and sealed. The Quotidians had rules about quarantine and the embassy had no choice but to enforce them. "Laura?" he said, "are you still out there?"

Laura had closed the door and begun quarantine procedures as soon as she saw Koen reach up to breach his suit. She hadn't yet left, though. Their translator bugs were still linked, and she'd been listening to those groans.

"Yes." She remembered her actual duties here and cleared her throat. "For the next fourteen days, the door won't open from the inside. We shouldn't have to open it from our end, either, but for absolute emergencies, there is a portable medical airlock we can fix to the frame. You won't need it, though," she hurried to add.

The bug transmitted the sound of a door opening, running water, and panting.

"Your personal belongings are already in there, and we'll deliver anything you need through the dumbwaiter system." She was babbling. And blushing. "I'll send your food up in...in any time you

want."

A pause in the panting. "Food?"

Laura wished she could see Koen's face. "Yes. Through the, um, dumbwaiter."

The dumbwaiter was actually a flexible robot that oozed its way around the outer walls of the cluster of linked containers that the humans called their embassy, but Koen didn't know that. Laura did, but tried not to think about it.

"Food," she said. "Anything you want."

"After a day like this? Before two weeks like this? Something simple. Hot soup. Yes, and hot chocolate."

"I can do that!"

"God, that would be beautiful."

***

Shockingly, it was.

The soup was instant ramen. The chocolate was… not chocolate. Cows, cacao, and sugar might have been harmed in the making of this beverage, but only emotionally.

And yet it was beautiful. The un-cocoa warmed Koen's belly and un-knotted his back. It made him remember his little apartment in Brasília, the condensation running down the walls and windows as he boiled his instant noodles. His apartment in Rotterdam, like all cages, both prison and a protection.

When Koen's eyes opened, they focused over the rim of his cup and out his window. It was of standard size and shape, and revealed nothing much: a tangle of wires, the crotch of a support structure and the octohedron it supported, traffic crawling like pill bugs and millipedes. No glimpse of sky or ground, just strangeness.

But in here, in this little nest of warmth, Koen had his meal. He savored it.

The diet hot chocolate was made with a calorically negligible sugar substitute, but the noodles were real carbohydrates, which amylase enzymes in Koen's saliva broke down into simpler di- and trisaccharides. These eventually hit his blood stream as sweet, sweet glucose.

Once his blood sugar had risen, Koen's brain started working.

He looked down at his empty plastic cups. "Oh, right," he said. "That's what I'm meant to do."