Page 21 of Tracked and Taken

She and the officer walk thirty seconds down the corridor.

I am alone with him for the time her boots make sixty steps.

Harkin watches her go.

He watches her because I am not moving, and his options for where to put his eyes are limited. Good. Let him look at the space where she was. Let him understand that the only thing left in the corridor is me.

I breathe in.

The overlay lights up. The compound on his hands. The copper of four months’ guilt. The amber flare of fresh fear, climbing. I let him see me take it.

I breathe out.

My pupils narrow. Silver going to slit. Harkin sees it happen and his cortisol dumps; my overlay flashes with the chemical shift like a warning light. The fear is correct. I have not moved. I do not need to.

I do not move.

My tail extends behind me along the deck plating. Not the spiral. Rigid. Drawn. Harkin’s eyes track it and stay.

I do not move.

I breathe in again. Deeper. His scent floods my palate. I let him watch me taste him. Let him understand I am reading every chemical he is producing and finding none of it interesting enough to waste words on.

His breathing goes shallow.

At the bend, Torres’s boots stop.

She is listening. SENTRY has not muted her feed, and Torres has not asked her to, and through the open channel I can hear Torres’s pulse the way my sensory system hears weather systems: a frequency, a pressure, a thing about to break.

Her pulse is not steady.

The knowledge that she is listening, that she is standing at the bend with her heart rate elevated while I break a man in silence, does something to the configuration of my tail that two years of freelance discipline is now holding in place by force. The urge to let it curl, to let the claim show, is almost stronger than the discipline. Almost.

Harkin breaks at twenty-two seconds.

A crack in his throat, the beginning of a word.

I raise my claws to my neck as I watch him intently.

His mouth closes.

A gesture that will read on every legal review as Tael Vosk standing silent in a corridor for thirty seconds, and is simultaneously the filthiest thing I have done with my hands in two years. The dominance of it, the absolute control of another man’s voice with nothing but presence, and knowing she is listening makes it better.

Torres’s boots start moving.

She walks back into the corridor with the face of a woman who just ran mundane detainee protocol. That is what the audio log will confirm.

Her pupils are dilated.

Her scent has shifted.

Harkin talks before she has fully turned around.

He did it for the money. It was not much money. That is the worst part for him: not much money. Enough to cover a terrible year. Not enough to be evil about.

Anonymous relay. Payment routed through a node in the Velarkis sector. He extended one diagnostic cycle. He swears on the life of a sister whose name I do not ask for that he extended one diagnostic cycle. Bay 7. Four months ago.

“And this week?”