Page 55 of Tracked and Taken

“A Korrhai diplomatic family disappeared from a station six months ago. Three adults, bonded. They surfaced dead in a wiped relay node not unlike V-6, four months later, arranged to suggest a pirate raid. The chemistry on the bodies was specialist. The hardware in the chamber they had been kept in carried the same Severin BioSystems stamps.”

Natalie sits down.

She sits on the crate beside mine, not looking at either of us, and draws the evidence bag from her kit and places the filament on the crate between us without a word.

“Xarthian,” Thane says.

“Bonded. Bond-signature in the oil. Pulled tonight from a Severin-stamped restraint anchor in a refitted chamber at V-6. He was in that chamber hours before we got there.” Her voice is level. “His name is Torek. His mate is a client of SNAG.”

Thane’s pupils widen another notch. “I have not had a name on the Xarthian thread before this evening.”

“You have one now.”

“And the team that came for you was the cleanup that came for him.”

“Yes.”

He picks up the filament bag. Turns it in his hand the way he turned the datapad. Sets it down.

“Whatever the front is for, it is moving bonded mates. My family was three. Your Xarthian is one. There are going to be many more.” Flat. “This is collection.”

“That is the word she used in the chamber,” I say. “SENTRY archived it.”

“She has good instincts, your Officer Torres.”

“She has the best instincts I have ever worked with.”

Natalie’s eyes flick to mine for half a second and back to the filament. The half-second lands and stays.

“I have not briefed SNAG. Or anyone. This is the first time these threads have been in one room.” He sets the datapad beside the evidence bag. “I am in your cache, Vosk, drinking your kasa, with a piece of evidence on the crate that says my six-month case and your two-day case are the same case. Think about what that means. Think about it before dawn.”

He does not need to say he is offering help. He stands. He washes the cup. He sets it on the shelf beside mine.

“I am taking the supervisor’s office,” he says, with his back to us. “I have been awake thirty-one hours. The crew berth is yours. Whatever you two need to do in it, you do not need an audience.”

The hatch closes. Within ninety seconds the snoring starts, a granite-bass Korrhai snore that fills the cache wall to wall, and which Thane is, I suspect, deploying on purpose.

The crew berth is smaller than the bunk on Helia’s Reach. A single narrow bunk built into the rock, a thermal blanket, a cleansing spigot, and a folded towel.

I sit on the edge. She kneels with the kit open; her face eight inches from my sternum, and my brain, without permission, in the half-second before her hands are on the field patch, produces an image.

Her on this bunk. Under me. The tank gone, the pants gone, her hands above her head where the bunk meets the rock and her knees either side of my hips and her dark eyes on mine as I lower onto her, saying my name in the register a female uses when she has decided.

The image lasts half a second. The purr deepens hard. I look at the bulkhead and force the picture down.

She unwraps the rib patch. Professional. Not looking at my face. Her breath at my collarbone where she bent to the wound, her hair fallen against the side of my throat, the smell of her, soap and cold air and her, in my face at a range it has not been since the cockpit.

The brain produces the second image. Both her hands flat on my chest, pushing me back onto the bunk. Her mouth at my throat, at the place my species keeps for the mark, and a Draelith registers teeth at the throat with the specific cardiovascular event my entire system is having.

Bulkhead. I count breaths. I think about the cold of space. The counting is only partially successful.

Her hands do not change. Her face does not change. But the pulse at the hollow of her throat, which my overlay has been mapping since the airlock this morning, climbs four beats.

She has felt the purr deepen. She has been kneeling between my knees for ninety seconds, and she has felt my body do things, and she is putting together that the things are happening because of a specific image in my head right now. She cleans the wound and wraps it the way it should have been wrapped, and her pulse climbs another two and settles there, and she moves to the shoulder, and she has not looked at my face once, because she knows what looking at my face will do to her hands, and her hands have to finish.

I count the rosettes on my forearm, because those are not the rosettes my brain aspires to be looking at.

She finishes the shoulder. She sits back on her heels. Her knees crack, and she winces, and she looks at me, and the look is the thing.