Page 21 of Azyr: Drifiting for Her

We lay like that for a long time. The radiator gurgulated its morning clearing of the throat. Light began to filter through the window, the particular grey of Portland dawn. I was still inside her, softening now but not yet willing to separate, and she was stroking my back, her fingers finding the places where my skin blurred at the edges, where the watercolor effect was strongest.

“I can feel you,” she said. “Both of you. Still.”

“Yes.” I kissed her shoulder, the place where her neck met her collarbone. “I do not want to move.”

“Then don’t.” She shifted, and I felt the movement inside her, the way we were still joined, and she made a small sound that might have been pleasure or might have been soreness. “Not yet. Just stay.”

I stayed. I memorized the moment. The weight of her beneath me, the smell of us together, the particular angle of light through the window that turned her skin to gold. I had never unpacked my case. I had never stayed anywhere long enough to learn the morning light. I was learning it now.

And then my brain re-engaged.

It was not a choice. The pattern recognition that made me valuable to the Corps, that had mapped eleven systems and found the thin ice before I knew I was looking, began to fire. The departure logs we had been examining, missing waypoints, and the timing that did not match.

I went still. Astoria felt it, her hand pausing on my back.

“What?”

“I am.” I pulled out of her, gently, carefully, and she made a small sound of loss that I would have attended to if I could. “I need to see the logs again. The ones we were looking at.”

“Azyr, we just…”

“I know.” I was already moving, finding my clothes, pulling them on with hands that still smelled of her. “I know. But I have seen something. I need to confirm.”

She sat up, reaching for her own clothes, and I saw the moment she decided not to be offended, the moment she chose to trust whatever this was. She dressed quickly, less carefully than usual, and followed me down the stairs.

The terminal was still glowing. I pulled up the logs we had abandoned hours before, and I laid my mental map over them, and I saw it. The pattern. The thing that had been nagging at the edge of my attention while I touched her, while I was inside her, while I learned the shape of her pleasure.

“Here,” I said, pointing. “And here. And here. Six women. All cleared for departure in the last four months. All with transit delays in the Kallan corridor. All with the same missing waypoint.”

Astoria leaned over my shoulder, close enough that I could smell us on her skin, and I felt her go still as she understood.

“These are my clients,” she said. “I cleared these women. I drove Colleen to the hub myself. I waved until the shuttle was a dot.”

“I know.” I pulled up the Survey Corps charts, the ones that showed what the civilian logs did not. “The missing waypoint. It is not a malfunction. It is a redirect. Gate three in the Kallan corridor leads to Ossari space. It has always led there. Someone has edited the civilian logs to hide it, to make it look like standard transit when the ships are being rerouted mid-flight.”

“Ossari space.” She said the name the way she might say a diagnosis. “Azyr, that’s a trafficking corridor. The IDA has warnings about there.“

“I know.” I turned to look at her, and I saw it happening, the collapse I had feared since I first understood who she was. “Astoria. The crime was designed by someone who understood exactly which administrative layer is never audited. That the transit authority runs the corridors while IDA runs the matching. No one watches the place where they meet.”

She stared at the screen. I watched her understand, watched her reach for the knowledge the way she had reached for me, with the whole of her attention.

“The goodbyes,” she said. Small. Broken. “I perfected them. I made them so clean, so professional, so…” She stopped. Her hand went to her mouth. “The women I cleared. The ones who stopped answering their advocates. I thought they were busy, that they were happy.”

She was shaking. I reached for her, pulled her against me, and she came without resistance, her face against my chest, her body trembling with the realization.

“I built this,” she said, muffled. “I built the system they used. The clean goodbyes, professional distance, and the way to make leaving look like the most reasonable thing in the world.”

“You did not build this.” I held her tighter, feeling her grief as my own, the way I felt everything now. “You built something to help people choose. Someone else weaponized it.”

“But I didn’t see.” She pulled back, and her face was terrible, the way it had been at the Council hearing but worse, because this was her own work she was seeing twisted. “I didn’t look. I was so busy being professional, being the goodbye person.”

She stopped. Her eyes found the screen again, the six names there, the six women she had cleared and sent into the dark.

“How many?” she asked.

“I do not know. I have found six. There may be more.”

“Find them.” She straightened, and I saw her armor up, the way she had at the Council, the procedural determination that carried her through horror. “Find all of them. And then we end this.”