Page 54 of Tracked and Taken

She files that. Her mouth does that thing.

“Okay.”

“You’ll tell me if it stops being okay.”

“I’ll tell you, Vosk.”

I bring us in.

The airlock cycles on my biometrics, and I see the cache through her eyes before she sees it through her own.

One small main room. Undressed rock at the ceiling, a strip of amber light along the floor seam because I never installed an overhead light. Supply crates against the far wall labeled RATIONS / MEDICAL / AMMUNITION / KASA in block capitals. A galley along the back wall, a kasa thermos, two cups on a shelf.

Through her eyes, it is a male’s bunker. The place a male sleeps for ten days after the worst week of his life and tells no one about it. The two cups are a question I have been refusing to answer for three years, and she is going to read all of it and file it and not say a word, and I am standing in my own airlock with my chest open to a Head of Station Security who is about to know more about how I live than any being in the registry.

The second cup is in Thane’s hand.

He is sitting on a crate in front of the galley wall, rifle propped beside him, drinking my kasa, and he looks at me like he has been waiting six hours to be looked at. He does not stand. Six-foot-eight of royal-blue Korrhai, the silver-blue dermal plates across his shoulders and upper arms catching the amber along their edges, two short ivory tusks, one broken, that graze rather than protrude, gold eyes with the pupils flat because he has not yet been moved by anything in the room.

He raises the cup.

“Vosk. You’re bleeding.”

“I’m aware.”

“You should sit.”

“I’ll sit when I’m ready to sit.”

His eyes move past me to Natalie. Cardigan rolled up over the dressing on her forearm. Dried blood on her shoulder. Field kit. His pupils widen one notch. He looks back at me, and he does not say you brought a person home, and he does not need to.

“Thane,” he says to her. “Korrhai. I am at your partner’s safehouse uninvited. He is not pleased.”

“He’s not my partner. Officer Torres.”

“Officer.”

He sets the empty cup on the crate beside the rifle and looks at me, and the silence holds until I acknowledge that he is going to make me ask.

“What are you doing here, Thane?”

“I have a case. It ended at a dock approach that turned out to be your cache.” He gestures at the crate across from him. “Sit. Then we share.”

He has, in his stillness, put the room on his terms. I am bleeding. Natalie is wary. Thane is calm. I sit. Natalie does not; she stands at my shoulder with her arms folded loosely and her weight on her left foot, keeping a strange male inside her sight lines, and Thane reads it and his face does not change.

“Six months,” he says. “A broker called Severin BioSystems. A front; I have not been able to map for what. They offered me a security contract, logistics oversight, garbage margins for the muscle they wanted. I declined. I have been tracking the work they commissioned with the muscle they hired in my place.”

“Kesh Vorrin.”

His eyes flick to mine.

“Corridor of Relay Node V-6, tonight. He held the concourse while a three-male team came at us in the spur. He didn’t engage.”

“Confirm.”

“The pivot off the lead foot. The knee he ruined on Valorian. The way he scans a room. It was him. Crex, Grolic, Threshari. All down.”

Thane breathes once. Then he draws a datapad from the field jacket beside him and turns it once in his hand without activating it.