Page 117 of Tracked and Taken

Mira.

The brass is smooth at the edges in the way brass goes smooth when it has been held against a male’s skin every day for years.

I do not have one of these.

A Draelith male commissions one when he has been pair-identified for some months and the bond is committed. The brass takes time to engrave. The sigil takes a craftsman. I have been pair-identified for five days and I have not had the time or the head to commission anything.

I told my mate I love her in a lab while I was refusing to mark her.

That is not how a male tells his mate he loves her.

I have not said it the way I want to say it. I have done none of the things a male does for the female he wants to spend the rest of his life with.

And the male in front of me — the male whose body I just walked away from on the chamber floor — has been carrying his pair-tag against his skin for four years. The brass is the only thing that kept him operational after Tyrre, after the chemistry in the walls thinned. His mate has been dead for four years, and the tag has been at his chest the whole time.

He died with the tag in his pocket and his hand at his own empty mate-mark spot.

The configuration I am scheduled to be in seventeen months and twenty-five days from now if Natalie walks.

The cold thing presses up under my sternum.

I do not push it back.

I close my hand around the disc.

It is warm. The residual chemistry in the brass is, by the half-register, still broadcasting. Mira is on the disc the way Kesh’s chemistry was on Natalie’s throat — present in a register that should not, by any read of mortality, still be possible.

He carried her.

For four years.

I say her name once, out loud, in the empty chamber.

“Mira.”

Somebody should say it in this room who is not dying. Somebody should say it like a name and not a wound.

I put the disc in the evidence bag with Kesh’s other personal items. I tag the bag. Flossie will log it. In the next months, when the investigation is finished, someone is going to have to decide what to do with a four-year-old pheromone tag with a dead female’s name on it.

That someone will not be me.

I close Kesh’s jacket.

I stand up.

I walk out of the induction chamber.

I do not, for the duration of the walk back to the ship, think about the disc.

For now, the back of my brain says, the quietest version it has ever said it.

For now.

At Helia’s Reach I cycle the airlock. The cabin pressure equalizes. I go to the bunk. Natalie is still sleeping. Her hand on my shirt. Her face turned into the field jacket I pulled over her shoulder. Her breath even. Her face in the small register of a woman who is not having a dream worth fighting.

I stand at the bunk for one minute.

Then I go to the cockpit.