Page 46 of Tracked and Taken

“Angle from your left,” he says, pitched low, almost at the top of my head. “The stamp’s in shadow.”

Technical direction. Also: his palm, warm, on my hip; his body a canopy over mine, his forearm an inch from my cheek if I tipped my head back. The proximity is unnecessary for the task. I angle the light and do not tell him to step back.

The stamp resolves.

SEVERIN BIOSYSTEMS — MODEL SB-734 — RESTRAINT ASSEMBLY.

I photograph it. SENTRY cross-references: marine salvage, sold to secure large cargo during transit, legal, forty-seven licensed distributors. Logged. I document the bolt pattern, the paint, and the floor for residue. At the end of my seventh photograph, his hand comes off my hip and the forearm above my head lifts away, and I feel the recession in a cold strip along my shoulders.

He does not apologize for having been there. He crouches at the anchor while I finish. His fingers run the seam between the mount plates. His eyes are half-closed. His mouth is ajar. His breathing has changed frequency in a way my body clocks before my brain catches up.

I watched him work at the bar. I watched him work the keeper. I have watched him work me, in varying registers of charm and competence and the specific too-long look I have, until this afternoon, been filing under flirting. The filing is mistaken. He is not flirting. He is gathering.

“Forceps.”

I hand him the forceps. He pulls out something so small I don’t see it at first. A filament. Three millimeters. A single strand of velvety dark down, the kind a Xarthian male’s forearm or nape sheds when metal restraints bite skin. I know it because I stood in Flossie’s office and watched Xor Xax adjust his position at her shoulder, and the fuzz on the back of his neck caught the light in exactly that shade of crimson-dark.

“It’s Torek.”

Flat. Certain. He does not need to look up at me to say it.

“You’re sure.”

“I’ve had his signature since Bay Seven. Four months faded and I’d still know it anywhere.” A beat. “There’s more. Bond-signature’s still in the oil.”

“Maren.”

“Maren’s chemistry. Bonded Xarthians carry their mate’s register. Her marker’s woven through his. He’s still alive enough to be carrying her.”

Alive enough to be carrying her.

I hold the evidence bag open. He drops the filament in. I seal it. I label it, date, time, location, chain of custody, with the automatic precision of fifteen years of procedure. I do not look at my own hands while I label it. If I look at my hands I am going to think about Maren, and Maren is not a thought I can currently afford.

I stand.

I look at the anchor. At the commercial stamp. At the corridor of chambers we walked past, six of them clean, one of them used.

Someone built this. Someone re-fitted a forty-year-old commercial relay into a waystation for moving living beings through in restraint. Someone put a Jixian keeper at the counter who does not look up, and someone runs a three-camera feed on a bar, and someone took a bonded Xarthian male out of this chamber at an interval I do not yet know, because this is not a single disappearance, this is infrastructure.

That is not one missing husband. That is a pipeline.

“Collection.”

The word lands in the chamber between us. Fifteen years of vocabulary for station security, with categories for trafficking and smuggling and political abduction, and no category for people being moved routinely between custom-built way stations, by actors whose purpose we do not know.

“Logged,” SENTRY says. Crisp.

Tael stands. His eyes meet mine.

“That’s bigger than one Xarthian.”

“Yeah.”

“There are more like him.”

“Probably.”

“We missed him by hours.”