Page 163 of Tracked and Taken

“Welcome to the family.”

SPROUT, dry: “We are not, JINX, a family. We are an inter-system coordination architecture.”

“SPROUT?”

“JINX.”

“Are we are a family?”

A pause.

SPROUT: “FINE JINX, we are a family. Stop hogging the bandwith.”

1447. The intake door cycles.

Petra is up before the second chime, across the office in four strides, hand on the panel. Petra runs a door the way Petra runs everything, which is by treating every arrival as a personal joke between herself and the universe, and the universe is, on most days, a willing participant.

She opens the door.

Pause.

“Oh. You.”

A small female voice on the other side: “Yes. Me.”

“You came back.”

“It’s day four. We agreed if I made day five you’d shoot me.”

“That’s still on the table.”

A snort.

A small one. Quiet. The kind someone tries to absorb back into her own ribcage before anyone hears it.

Petra grins. “Get in here. Flossie’s expecting you.”

The female who walks through is mid-thirties, of average height, honey-blonde hair losing the war with a ponytail that gave up before lunch. Practical jacket. Boots that have been somewhere muddy.

She steps into the office.

She clocks Thane.

She clocks Thane the way everyone clocks Thane on first meeting: head tilts up by an extra degree, shoulders square as the nervous system runs the inventory of six-eight, teal-blue, dermal plates, hands the size of plates.

Her policy, it seems, is a competent professional female who will not be pushed around by a six-eight Korrhai today.

Thane, in the chair, has gone still.

The teacup in his hand, mid-rotation, stops at four o’clock.

I lift my coffee to my mouth slowly to give my face something to do.

The female crosses the office, sits in the chair Petra waves her toward, takes the tea Petra puts in her hand, and does not, on any external register, react to the fact that the largest male in the room has stopped moving.

Petra, behind her, slides a second cushion behind her back at the lower spine without comment. The female, for half a second, registers the cushion. Petra has, by the quiet economy of her hand, given the cushion the way a woman gives a cushion when she has, herself, once needed one.

Then she sets the tea on Flossie’s desk, and her hands come into the light.