Page 98 of Tracked and Taken

His footsteps go around the corner.

The corridor behind me is empty in the way a throat is empty before it swallows.

I do not hear the footsteps behind me until they are four meters away.

16

Induction

Natalie

I turn.

The male in the chamber doorway is — I recognize him in the second I turn and my stomach turns with him.

Silver-eyed. Charcoal-skinned. The rosettes along his forearms are gray at the edges — not silver-gray, the gray of dying vegetation, the necrosis a Draelith male’s chemistry produces when his regulatory systems have been failing long enough to eat the tissue that should be broadcasting. His face is thinner than it was in the corridor at V-6. The skin under his jaw has the sallow pull of weight he could not afford to lose. His lips are thin. His canines, as he exhales a half-breath, flash at his teeth — not the seductive flash Tael’s canines have, the skeletal flash of a male whose tissue has receded from the enamel.

His silver eyes have gone flat.

No light.

The scent coming off him reaches me a half-second after I register the face. It is wrong— not the healthy pheromone signature of a bonded or identified male but something sour underneath, the smell of chemistry eating itself. Why?

I do not want him near me.

“Kesh Vorrin.”

He does not reply.

His eyes flick to the tactical kit at my shoulder — to the Junction One insignia stitched at the collar — and then to my face. He reads the nameplate inside a second.

“Torres. Step away from the Xarthian. Slowly.”

His voice is the rough register of someone conserving breath. His right hand holds a sidearm low at his hip, angled up a quarter-inch, the ready-low carry of a Tier 2 tracker who has been trained to put a round through a human female’s sternum inside a half-second if she gives him reason to.

I do not give him reason to.

I keep compressing.

“She will live or she will die. You bought her a chance. Walk with me.”

“I’m not leaving her.”

“Your tracker will return to this chamber in sixty seconds. When he does, he will find you here, and he will, at that point, react in ways that cost both of you.”

“Which is what?”

“Walk. Now. I will not ask twice.”

The math runs fast.

Tael returns in sixty seconds. Kesh is armed. Tier 2. Sick Draelith males run on crisis adrenaline in a way that makes them harder to drop, not easier. If I fight him here — unarmed, mid-compression, in a tight chamber — I die. The Xarthian dies. Tael returns to two dead females and kills the station.

If I walk, he takes me somewhere. Tael tracks. Tael arrives. The fight is Tael’s.

Walk is the play.

I step away from the Xarthian.