Page 19 of Azyr: Drifiting for Her

“I am always still up.”

“I know.” She came into the room, close enough that I could smell the mint on her breath from the tea she drank when she could not sleep. “Show me what you’re looking at.”

I turned the terminal toward her. The departure logs glowed there, forty names in the system she had built, the web of connections she maintained with her own hands. She leaned over my shoulder to read them, and her warmth crossed the space between us like a weather front.

“You’ve pulled Colleen’s file,” she said. “And Tessa’s. And…” she scrolled, frowning, “these are all the stalled departures. The ones with paperwork issues.”

“I have been looking for patterns.”

“You’re not supposed to be looking at all.” But she did not step back. Her hip rested against the arm of my chair, a pressure I could have measured in newtons and chose instead to simply feel. “This is my job, Azyr. My worry.”

“You are not sleeping either.”

She made a sound, not quite agreement. “I keep thinking about Renata. How close they came to stopping her. How many others…?” She stopped, straightened, and I thought she would retreat to the distance she maintained so carefully. Instead she reached past me for the keyboard, her arm brushing my chest, and pulled up a different view. “If you’re going to obsess, obsess with the right data. This is the full departure manifest. Six months back.”

I stood. It brought us closer than we had been in the office before, closer than the client chair allowed, closer than the clipboard she used as a shield. She did not step away. We stood together before the screen, and I could feel the heat of her along my side, could smell the particular soap she used, could have mapped the exact angle of her shoulder against my arm.

“Show me,” I said.

She did. We worked through the night that way, standing too close, pointing at screens, her voice going rough with fatigue and something else I did not name. The logs accumulated. Departure times, transit corridors, arrival confirmations. I held them in my memory as she spoke them, laying them against the star-charts I carried, looking for the anomalies that were not there.

Until they were.

“Wait,” I said. “That route. The Kallan corridor. Pull it up again.”

She did. I stared at it, feeling the familiar click of pattern recognition, the thing that had made me valuable to the Corps and useless to myself. The corridor was standard. The timing was not.

“This one,” I said. “And this one. They are using the same transit window, three weeks apart. But the first cleared in eighteen hours. The second took nine days.”

“Transit delays happen,” she said. “Weather, mechanical…”

“Not in the Kallan corridor. It is automated. It is…” I stopped, reaching for the mental map, overlaying the routes I knew against the ones she showed me. “There is a waypoint missing. Between the second and third gate. It is not on the official log.”

She turned to look at me, and her face was very near. “How do you know?”

“I know every route I have ever flown. This one,” I pulled up my own files, the Survey Corps charts that were not supposed to overlap with her civilian logs, and laid them over hers. “This one I surveyed two years ago. There is a relay station at these coordinates. It is not in your departure log. Your transit log jumps from gate two to gate four as if gate three does not exist.”

She stared at the screen. I watched her mind work behind her eyes, the same thing I did to coastlines, the whole system at once. “That’s impossible. The IDA system logs every waypoint. It’s automated. You can’t just⁠—”

“Someone did.” I turned to face her fully, and we were standing chest to chest, and neither of us moved to correct it. “Astoria. Someone with access to the transit layer is editing logs. Removing waypoints. Making it look like standard travel when…“

I stopped. Not because I had run out of words. Because she had reached up, her hand finding the collar of my shirt, and I went still as prey, as predator, as a man who had wanted this for so long he had forgotten how to want anything else.

“Azyr,” she said. Not a question. A naming.

I picked her up. I did not decide to. My hands were under her thighs and she was against my chest and her arms had gone around my neck before I could inventory the decision. She weighed less than my field kit. She weighed exactly enough. The blue rose in my hands where I held her, visible even in the dark room, and I did not try to hide it.

“Your room,” she said. “Upstairs. Not here.”

I was already moving. Nine steps to the stairs, the board that gave under the sixth, the turn at the landing. I had memorized this route without deciding to, the way I memorized everything, and now I used it in the dark with her breath warm against my throat. She did not speak. Her fingers had found the open collar of my shirt, the skin there, and I felt the touch like voltage.

My room was narrow, nine steps by seven, the bed narrow against one wall, my case still packed in the corner. I had not unpacked. I laid her on the bed and she pulled me down with her, and the case was in my peripheral vision, unopened, and I did not care.

I kissed her. I had not decided to do that either. Her mouth was warm and tasted of mint and sleeplessness, and she opened to me with a sound I would carry for the rest of my life, laid down in order with every other thing I could not forget. Her hands were under my shirt, finding skin, and I felt the blue surge in response, the color rising to meet her touch.

“Your skin,” she said against my mouth. “It’s…”

“Yes.” I pulled back enough to let her see, the deep living blue that had replaced the pale uncertainty of the hallway, the color that meant wanting, belonging, home. “It does this. I cannot control it.”