Page 50 of Tracked and Taken

“For now. He wants to see where we go next.”

Two hundred meters of open deck. I do not look up at the four mezzanine balconies that would give a tracker of his caliber a clean line on our exit. It is the longest walk of my career.

The airlock cycles. Helia’s Reach smells like dried botanicals and old leather and Tael, and my body does something with the scent that I will address when I am not bleeding.

I get him to the cockpit couch. He does not pretend that he does not need it.

He reaches for the yoke. “Get us out of here, JINX.”

“Tael, do not ignite. Unauthorized device on the port thruster housing. SRS Mk-IV sabotage charge. Calibrated to trigger on ignition.”

His hand stops.

“How bad?”

“We lose the port thrusters in the first three seconds. We do not survive the burn.”

“Clear it.”

I have the trigger circuit. I do not have the depolarization protocol.

SENTRY, crisp: “I have the protocol in my reference library. I will lead. JINX provides hardware interface.”

Sentry.

“JINX.”

I want it on the record that I am supporting under protest.

“Logged. Seven minutes.”

Five if I run point.

“Five is the margin on which your last three field neutralizations failed. I have your after-action reports.”

I pushed those for comparative study, SENTRY. Not for leverage.

“Duly logged. Beginning protocol.”

Both AIs go silent. The only sound in the cockpit is the ship at idle and a Draelith male breathing through a wound across his ribs, and I have seven minutes and a field kit and hands I am going to put on him.

I open the kit.

I cut his shirt off with my utility knife. I do not ask him to lift his arms; asking would be an exchange, and I am not in the mood for one.

The rib wound is diagonal, outside of the lower ribs angling toward the sternum, deep, not through the intercostal but close, bleeding steadily. The shoulder is under the collar and the blood has soaked the dark fabric and I will get to it. The ribs are faster.

I kneel between his knees.

The cockpit floor is not generous and his legs do not fold short, so kneeling puts my chest level with his ribcage and my face inches from his sternum and my hands on him in the configuration a medic takes with a patient who is six-foot-five of bare-chested Draelith and has just gone feral in a corridor for her.

He went feral. He contained a corridor full of hostiles, and then he saw blood on my arm and he went. Something is happening in my core that does not have words.

Focus, Torres.

I press the antiseptic gauze to the wound. His skin is hot under my palm, and the rosettes shift across his ribs with the breath he takes, and at the second my palm meets bare skin—

He purrs.