Page 128 of Tracked and Taken

I close my eyes.

I think about what Kesh said.

About the chemistry and the choice. About what biology makes you do and what you make biology do. About Kesh in the chamber and his canines at my throat and the compound in my body and the want that was not mine. I think about Tael’s no. I think about the registers of his face when he said I love you in a lab while he was refusing me. I think about the disc in Kesh’s pocket and the four years he carried it.

I think about him.

About what he has been doing to my body since the morning he caught me at the cache. The pull he has been exerting on my chemistry. The pull I have, for five days, been in and choosing to hold against and choosing to give to and choosing, in every configuration of choosing my body has been allowed to make.

The chemistry is real.

The chemistry is my chemistry.

The choice is mine.

Three women went into a cargo hold and did not come out of it. The evidence was mine. The filing was correct. The chain of command ran exactly as far as a man with warm coffee in his hand who told me that pursuing it would compromise operational priorities.

They stopped being recoverable while I was still filing.

Four years of running this station by the rulebook, and I built the rulebook so that nobody would ever again get to make that decision over a cup of coffee. It has not occurred to me until this second that I also built it so that nothing could happen to me I had not authorised in advance.

Tael has not once asked me to authorise anything. He has asked me to decide.

I think about my mother’s garden in the print at the counter. I think about the female she was. The female she would want me to be. What she would want me to choose.

She would want me to choose what I want.

I want him.

The wanting is not the chemistry. The wanting has been in my body since the moment he caught me at the cache and held me upright in his arm without asking permission, and which has been every configuration of yes my body knows how to make.

My brain tells me this is too fast for a human woman; I should be sure. But my heart wants him because he was going to die for me without telling me, and because when I asked he told me, and because he refused me at the cost of his own body and held the line for both of us, and because he washed another male’s chemistry off my skin while his own biology was screaming, and because he held me up when my body was breaking against his chest, and because his chest made a sound I had never heard a male’s chest make, and because his hand at the yoke when he said I am sorry as deep as I have the language for and meant every word.

I want him because he is the one.

I have decided. So I open my eyes. I stand up and I walk to the lift.

20

Mine

Tael

Seventeen months and twenty-four days.

The number was twenty-five yesterday, in a chamber on Iris-Nine, standing over a monster who died with his hand at his own empty throat. It has gone down by one while I sat on this bunk with my elbows on my knees and did not sleep, and it will go down by one again tomorrow.

Her field jacket is on the pillow beside me.

It has been there since I pulled it over her shoulder on my ship this morning so that anything approaching that bunk would smell me first. She never took it back. I carried it off Helia’s Reach under my arm like a male carrying evidence, and I put it on the pillow, and I have not moved it, and there is no operational justification for any part of that sequence.

Level six is one floor up. She is in it, or asleep in it, and either way the arithmetic is the same: she said in my own time, and my time is not the time under discussion.

So I sit.

The quarters are the temporary contractor issue Florence processed at 0900 on day one. A bunk. A washroom. A shelf. Nothing on it. Nine years at SRS and three years freelance and I have never once put anything on a shelf, and it has never once, until this evening, read to me as information about myself.

I should prepare for both outcomes.