Page 11 of Tracked and Taken

Gold eyes find mine. Xor does not soften the answer.

“Four months of bond-silence for an eleven-year pair puts the human mate in the last survivable window. If we recover him inside three weeks, she lives. Past four, we are recovering a body.”

“Four months,” I say. “Maren’s intake says four months. Your notebook is older than that.”

Flossie does not look up from the page. “Nine months, lovey. I wrote him down nine months ago, because somebody should have been looking for him then and nobody was.”

“Then the dates don’t agree.”

“The dates agree perfectly.” Xor’s gold eyes do not move off mine. “They are not measuring the same thing. Florence counted from the docking record. Maren counted from the silence. He went missing the better part of a year ago. His bond went quiet four months ago.”

The arithmetic assembles in my chest before I have finished wanting it to.

“Then somebody held him for five months before they put him under.”

“Yes.”

“Where.”

Flossie’s pen stops on the page. “That, lovey, is the line I have been staring at since I wrote it.”

The room quiets.

Flossie’s pen stops. She reaches up without looking, without needing to, and lays her hand over Xor’s where it rests on the back of her chair. His tail goes still. Neither of them says anything. The surrounding room has been rewritten by the claiming-mark and a shared wall and the way he stands behind her chair like the spot was engineered for him, and I understand, looking at them, that Xor did not give us the textbook answer. He gave us the answer he has been memorizing since the day he marked her, in case he ever has to survive it.

I have never, in fifteen years, understood what that looks like from the outside.

It looks like this.

My chest does a complicated thing I catalog and file.

“Three weeks,” I say. Operational voice. “Understood.”

Xor’s thumb moves once across Flossie’s knuckles. It is the smallest gesture I have ever seen a seven-foot apex predator make, and I do not know what to do with the fact that it is almost unbearable to witness.

“SPROUT,” Flossie says. “File update.”

The amber orb at the ceiling brightens. “Filing Bay 7 findings under Case Torek, sub-category Methodology: Unidentified Synthetic. Premeditated. I have also cross-referenced the maintenance-level access list with station betting pool participation. I am not saying this is relevant. I am saying I have done it.”

“Sprout.”

“Logged, Flossie. Filed under Overstepping: Anticipated.”

Petra snorts. The sound is immediate and genuine and Petra-shaped, and she doesn’t apologize for it.

“Xor.” Flossie again. The briefing tempo. “Tactical read on inside-access extraction methodology?”

“Corporate procurement. The shell registration, the synthetic overlay, the system modification: none of it is opportunistic. The extraction team had a window, a delivery, and a destination. They had the Xarthian biological profile and they had the Junction One security schedule. That level of preparation requires operational intelligence SRS would call Tier Two minimum.” His golden eyes move across the room. Not hostile. Assessing. “Who has maintenance-level access to your camera diagnostics?”

“Seventeen people.”

The room absorbs the number.

“Pull the list,” he says.

I pull up the datapad.

The list populates. Seventeen names. Station maintenance crew, long-serving, vetted. Faces I recognize from four years of morning briefings and shift reports and the quiet, invisible work of keeping a station running. Good people. People I trusted with access to infrastructure that protects three hundred and forty thousand civilians.