Page 97 of Tracked and Taken

“Yes.” Breathing. Sedated. Arranged. “His family surfaced dead four months after they went. These are not them.”

“No. Another three.”

“There are more families.”

“Yes.”

“How many.”

“I don’t know. Keep moving.”

43-A: Vendrish female. Tag.

42-C: Xarthian pair. Tag.

Tael’s scent is stronger. This place is pulling it out of him. I stay on his six because I said I would and because his body is writing the same instruction in the air.

JINX: “Third patrol detected. Contractor scent signatures moving toward the lower decks.”

41-B.

Xarthian female. Small. Pulse on the panel: twelve. Dropping.

“Tael.”

“Torres, three-minute window—“

“She’s flatlining.”

Eleven.

I am through the seal with my hands on her chest before the panel updates. Compressions. Rate drilled at nineteen.

Tael at the door: “Nat.”

Not operational and he does not want to leave this doorway.

“Go. Next corridor. Two minutes. Come back.”

“I am not leaving you.”

“She dies if I stop.”

The sentence is correct. It is also a mistake I can already feel. Sending him away in this building is incorrect and I am doing it anyway because my hands are on a chest that is not rising, and I do not have a third option.

He does not move. Claws out. Tail rigid. The look from Parr’s Anchor — whoever comes through this door is already dead.

“Ninety seconds, Natalie.”

“Copy.”

He goes.

I hear the cost in the first two steps. I want him back before the third.

Fourteen. Seventeen. Twenty.

The chest under my hands is too still. The panel ticks. Eleven. Ten.