Page 38 of Tracked and Taken

Third hour. I pour my kasa, dark and resinous, the smoke-and-root reduction my species drinks when we need to sit still for a long time, and Torres’s nose wrinkles.

“It smells like a tire fire.”

“It does.”

“Give me the mug.”

“Torres, you do not want to try it. You are going to hate this, and then you are going to blame me for the hating of it.”

“I am a grown woman, Vosk.”

“A fact my entire sensory system has been registering since you walked through my airlock, Torres, please don’t make me defend it.”

The sentence is out before my operational filters catch it, and she goes still for a full second, and her eyes come off the navigation display and land directly on my face. The heat in the words is still audible. I do not take them back. I sit with what I said and let her do whatever she is going to do with it, because I do not regret saying it.

I do not look away. I do not smile. I do not apologize.

She holds my eyes for three beats. Then she holds her hand out for the mug.

Our fingers meet on the handle, and the quarter-second of contact registers in my rosettes, warm in the way they get warm when the nervous system has decided a thing. The decision has already been made. The only question left is when.

She sips. The face she makes would get her court-martialed on a Draelith vessel.

“That is not a drink. That is a punishment.”

“It is an acquired beverage.”

“Your species has made choices.”

She hands the mug back. Our fingers meet again. I drink the kasa, and I drink it from the side of the handle her fingers touched, and JINX, by the grace of SENTRY’s continuing mute, says absolutely nothing about it. The taste of the place her skin was is still on the rim. I take it deliberately.

The cockpit goes quiet around the kasa. My regulation, which has been running two degrees hot since she walked through the airlock, drops. Not to baseline. Close to it. My sensory system has stopped briefing my brain every four seconds on what her proximity means and started, for the first time since her office, accepting it.

I do not enjoy the drop. The drop is data. The data says my body has decided she belongs in this space. The data is not something I am prepared to act on. Yet.

JINX, quiet, unmuted by SENTRY on some private negotiation I am not cleared to witness: “Tael. Resting cardiac output has drifted five percent since the briefing in her office. Core temperature baseline up point-eight. Scent register shows—“

“Mute.”

Muted. Flagged for review.

“Review yourself. I am not having the conversation.”

He mutes. He does not argue. JINX does not argue this data.

Her pulse, in the co-pilot’s seat, is at sixty-three. Mine, beside hers, is not at baseline, and my body has done the math on why and has presented me with the answer in the register my body uses for answers I will not act on, which is available regardless.

I fly.

Fourth hour.

“Vosk. Harkin filed three diagnostic logs for one calibration.”

“Show me.”

She tilts the datapad. I lean across the eight inches. Six. Four. The scent at the hollow of her throat is the scent my overlay has been reserving as baseline since Bay Seven, and I am four inches from the throat, and the pulse in it is running fourteen beats above where it was ninety seconds ago. Close enough that if I turned my head my mouth would be on the skin. Close enough that I can feel the heat of her breath when she exhales.

Three logs. Four minutes apart.