Page 124 of Tracked and Taken

“Yes, Natalie.”

I close my eyes again.

I do not cry.

We dock at Junction One. From the cockpit’s side, it looks different. The station is the one I have run for four years. It is a place I am returning to with information I did not have when I left it.

The airlock cycles.

Flossie is at the inner hatch.

She is in her ops jacket, her hair pinned tight, her face holding three crises in the upper register of her brain. The face holds until after the hatch cycles. Then it cracks.

She crosses the threshold. Her arms around me. Hard. The hard of a woman who has, for a day and a half, been holding her people in the upper register of her brain and has, in the moment of seeing them alive, run out of the discipline to hold them up there.

“Natalie?”

“Flossie.”

“You are back.”

“I am back.”

“You are alive and you have a wound at your ribs and I am going to need you to let me hug you for ten before I do anything operational with you.”

“Copy.”

She holds me for the full ten. Her face at my shoulder. Her hand at the back of my head. She smells like her office — the tea she runs at every meeting, the lavender at the corner of her desk, the warmth she keeps running on purpose because the work runs on it.

She lets me go.

She turns to Tael.

“Tael.”

“Flossie.”

“Come here.”

He comes. He is more than a head taller than she is. She gets her arms around his ribs and hugs him in the way only Flossie Knight could hug a six-foot-five Draelith tracker who is not, by the natural state of his species, a male hugged by anyone.

He stands still for three.

Then his arms come around her.

She lets him go.

“Tea in my office in two hours. Both of you. After medical. Bring nothing operational. We are going to drink tea and you are going to tell me what your tracker did with that cocky face of his when he had to clean a wound. Then we will do the case. Yes?”

“Yes, Flossie.”

She nods once. The crack in the face seals.

She goes operational.

“Torek is awake. He is in medical. Maren has been with him for the last two hours. He is asking for the people who got him out.”

“Copy.”