Page 33 of Tracked and Taken

“You are welcome.”

I go into the bathroom. I take the braid out fully and brush it through because the braid is tight and Ardent was not wrong about that. I wash my face. I brush my teeth. I redo the braid looser, not un-regulation, a loose regulation, and the braid falls heavy across one shoulder, the braid a woman wears when she will not be saluted for the next ten days.

I look in the mirror.

The woman in the mirror is five-nine, forty, sharp jaw, scar through the left eyebrow, and a pulse still running two beats above standard from a corridor at 1806 that I will apparently never fully regulate down from.

She looks good.

I am allowed to notice this. Nobody is going to die because I noticed I look good. Nobody is going to file a report because I spent, I check the time, forty-one minutes on a braid and a face wash.

Forty-one minutes.

He said two words in a corridor and walked away like they had cost him nothing. They cost him something. He wants to play that game, he can play it in a cockpit with a woman in civilian clothes and a braid that is not structural, and we can both spend nine hours pretending we are here for the case.

I am here for the case.

I am mostly here for the case.

I turn the light off.

0551. Bay 12.

I am four minutes early. I would have been five minutes early, except I stood outside the airlock for sixty seconds doing the breathing I do when I need my face to be the face of a woman who slept.

I did not sleep.

Tael’s ship is small. VOSK — TRACK / RECOVERY is barely visible under a new hand-painted sign which now reads HELIA’S REACH on the hull in a registry-non-compliant font that I am going to fine him for from Velarkis, specifically because I want something to argue with him about that is not the other thing.

He is here.

He is leaning against the ship, arms folded, wearing a black shirt that is not the jacket, not the windbreaker, not the vest. Civilian. Dark. The rosette markings move along the inside of his wrists where the sleeves are pushed up, and I do not look at the rosettes, and my eyes do not track the line of them down into the cuff.

He looks up when I come through the airlock.

He does not smirk.

The silver of his eyes does something I cannot name. His nostrils flare once. Slightly. The particular Draelith tell just absorbed a scent-data packet; his sensory system is going to be running for the next nine hours. He does not speak for a full two seconds, which is two seconds longer than Tael Vosk has ever not spoken to me since I met him.

I clock the two seconds.

“Torres.”

“Vosk.”

He steps aside. Gestures at the airlock. “After you.”

I board. He boards behind me. The cockpit smells like him, years of scent concentrated in recycled air, and I sit in the co-pilot’s seat and breathe through my mouth for four seconds because the alternative is what my pupils want to do, which is not an operational choice I am willing to commit to on three hours of sleep and a braid I redid twice.

“Temperature in here—“

“Five degrees above human standard.”

“It’s like a sauna with a dashboard.”

“Adjust it.”

I adjust it. Three degrees down. The thermostat acknowledges the input.