Page 19 of Tracked and Taken

Harkin is inside, stowing tools into a locker. He looks up. Sees Torres. Sees the uniforms. Sees me in the borrowed vest with the Junction One crest, and something happens in his face that is not what I expected.

Not fear first. Not guilt first.

Calculation.

Amber flares in my overlay, a late fear response catching up. Copper underneath: guilt, the sour compound has been marinating in what he did. And on his hands: the synthetic. Fresh. Days old, maybe hours.

But the first thing was calculation. The look of someone counting exits.

“Torres,” I say. Low. Under the detention protocol. The tracker voice. “He’s thinking about—“

The wrench is already in his hand.

He pulled it from the locker before we came in. Must have. Heard the boots, heard the positioning, and took the two seconds he had to palm a tool he could swing. It comes up now, short arc, close range, aimed at Torres’s temple because she’s closest, because she’s the one giving orders, because she is the physical shape of the thing he is about to lose.

My body moves before my brain authorizes it.

Three and a half meters of bay and I cross it sideways, a lateral shift, the kind a predator makes without committing weight, the kind my training gave me and my biology has just taken over. My arm comes up. My shoulder meets the wrench. The impact thuds through the deltoid and into my ribcage.

My claws are out.

I did not decide to extend them. They are out anyway, ten points of black keratin riding the edges of fingers that are gripping Harkin’s wrist with a pressure one degree short of breaking bone. The wrench clatters to the deck plating. The sound is distant. What is not distant is the absolute, primal certainty that no one puts hands on what is mine to protect.

“Don’t.” My voice has gone somewhere it hasn’t been since SRS. The extraction voice. Quiet. Final. “Don’t move, Harkin.”

He doesn’t move.

Torres is already in position. She covered the distance to Harkin’s other side while I was intercepting: no wasted motion, the choreography of a woman who read the room fast enough to trust one flank to me while she took the other. Her hand is on her sidearm. Not drawn. The threat doing the work.

Her officers cuff him in eleven seconds.

They seat Harkin on a maintenance crate. The wrench goes into an evidence bag. Torres is breathing evenly, because Torres is Torres, but her pupils have expanded a full millimeter, and her eyes move from my face to my hand to the ten points of black keratin that did not retract on their own the way they did in Bay 7.

“Vosk.”

“Yes.”

“Hands.”

I look at my hands. The claws. The pressure signature on Harkin’s wrist where I had him.

I retract the claws. It takes two tries. The first try is the try of a system that does not believe the threat is over. The second try is the try of a system that has been reminded, by Torres’s voice, that the threat is cuffed and seated and that the male standing in this bay with his claws out is not required to be the male solving this. Her voice is the only thing that works. That fact is not lost on me.

My fingers go soft. Harkin’s wrist goes unbruised.

Torres does not thank me. Torres would never thank me in front of a detainee. Her chin lifts a fraction—the micro-signal that is, in her vocabulary, the equivalent of a hand on my forearm and a word I will never hear her say.

“Harkin.” She walks to the crate. Her voice is back to station-issue, the level-the-way-a-blade-is-level register. “You just assaulted a civilian contractor in front of two Junction One officers. That’s seven years’ detention before we even open the calibration log. Talk to me.”

“I want a lawyer.”

“You’ll get one. After you tell me what the compound on your hands is.”

“I don’t know what—“

“You have it on your hands right now.” She nods to me without looking. “He can see it. You’re sitting in a holding bay covered in a controlled substance you’ve been handling within the last forty-eight hours , and I am offering you approximately ninety seconds to get out in front of this before it becomes the worst day of your life.”

Harkin’s mouth closes and is going to stay closed. I can see it in his jaw, the same shut-down I told her was coming, arriving on schedule and forty seconds ahead of even my window. What comes out of this jaw is going to be whatever his handler told him to say.