Page 47 of Tracked and Taken

“I know.”

“Maren is dying.”

“I know, Torres.”

My chest does an unexpected thing it does not do on a scene, and his head turns a fraction because his hearing clocked it, and I look away first, because looking back at him right now is not a thing I can afford. The look would include everything that has happened since the airlock. The word mate and the thumb on bare skin and his purr under my palm. I am not ready for that look.

“Let’s move. Back to the ship. We get this to Flossie. We get Maren’s window before—“

JINX, through SENTRY’s shared channel, urgent: “Tael. Proximity alert. Single vessel. Fast. Military-grade. Transponder masking, I recognize.”

My hand is already on my sidearm.

Tael’s claws are already out.

The chamber is twelve meters from the breach hatch, the corridor behind us is a sealed spur we just authorized ourselves into, and we have perhaps ninety seconds before whoever is flying the incoming vessel is in this corridor with us.

We do not have time to leave.

8

Two Blades

Natalie

The proximity alert is still in my ear when Tael takes my wrist.

Not my hand. My wrist. The grip of a working hand is now the one making decisions, and we are out of the chamber in one breath and down the C spur at a run, past the six clean doors he scented on the way in.

At the breach hatch, he stops me with a flat palm across my chest and puts his ear to the seal.

“Three through the airlock. Fourth still docking.”

“How long.”

“Ninety seconds. Less.”

“The service corridor is the only way back.”

“Maintenance crawl to the A spur. Clocked it coming in. Behind you. Low panel.”

The crawl is a half-meter square, unlit, twelve meters parallel to the spur before it dog-legs. I go first because his shoulders will not. They catch twice on the bracket supports behind me, and he does not make a sound.

A spur. Amber. Sealed berths in sequence. The junction with the concourse eight meters down.

Tael freezes at the junction.

He does not lift a hand. He does not tell me what he is seeing. He goes still, the deep predator stillness that is itself the message, and my body reads it without being told. His shoulders drop. His tail, rigid working posture all evening, lifts off the deck and goes into the raised flick my species briefing filed under engaged: high lethality intent. The strip of neck between the collar and hairline has gone darker.

I have not seen his face. I do not need it. The body in front of me is reading kill, and the body in front of me has, for every meeting and corridor and SNAG office since he walked into mine, been reading coordinate.

He turns his head a fraction toward me. Silver eyes gone to slits in the amber.

“Vosk.”

“Shh.”

“You know him?”