Page 48 of Tracked and Taken

A beat.

“Yes.”

“Is he the worst one?”

“Yes.”

I ease my head around his shoulder.

He is standing in the arch of the concourse doorway with his hands loose at his sides, and he is not doing anything at all.

Draelith. Taller than Tael, heavier through the shoulders, dark coat over dark everything, the rosettes at his throat too faint to read at eight meters in amber light.

He is not looking down the A spur at us. He is looking at the deck plating a few feet in front of his own boots, the way a man looks at a floor when what he is actually doing is listening to something two rooms away. His tail does not move. His hands do not move. Nothing on him moves; it is the stillness of an object somebody set down there and has not come back for.

Three seconds. I count them the way I have counted seconds through a scope, one, two, three, and on the third the amber over the arch stutters, once, in a way the lighting on this station has not stuttered all evening.

I blink.

The doorway is empty.

The arch of the concourse, the deck beyond, the bar in its alcove, the keeper’s counter unmanned. No Draelith. Tael’s body does not relax.

“He was there,” I say.

“He was there.”

“Where did he go?”

“He didn’t go. He moved.”

JINX, on the shared channel: “Tael. Three biological signatures inbound from the concourse. Fourth signature has gone dark.”

“Dark.”

He is holding stealth somewhere on the upper structure. Tael moves me back from the edge with his shoulder and puts my spine to the bulkhead. Claws out. Breathing slow.

“Three inbound. We take the three. Then we get to the ship.”

“Through him.”

“He won’t come down at us yet. Not with the team in motion.”

“Why? Who is he?”

“Later, Torres.”

Boots on the A spur plating. Three sets. Fast.

The first one comes from the ceiling.

He drops out of the overhead duct in silence and lands between us before I register the drop. Threshari. Tall, gaunt, translucent skin with the blood vessels mapped in blue and black beneath it, an elongated skull, more teeth than anatomy should permit, a blade in each hand. He splits us. One blade to Tael. One for me.

Mine comes high, along the line the carotid would take, and fifteen years of Military Police training gets my left arm up in time, and not cleanly. The blade scores the outside of my forearm from elbow to wrist, cardigan and skin, a hot fast line, shallow and real, and the blood is on my knuckles before my body has filed the strike.

He pivots, broken-rhythm, and I get his wrist for the second pass, and we are trading at a speed my body has not worked at in five years, and Tael is two meters to my right taking the other blade on his forearm and claws with the low, contained attention of the working version of him.

Then he sees the blood on my arm.