Page 101 of Tracked and Taken

“He has not told you?”

“Told me what, Kesh.”

“Oh.”

The single syllable.

It is the first time since he walked into the upstairs chamber that his voice has done anything other than flat.

“Tell me, Kesh.” I shout, panic blooming.

“There is a condition. When a Draelith pair-identifies a female and does not complete the bond — and the bond is completed by the mark, not by the act — his regulatory systems fail. Over eighteen months. He dies.”

The act. Last night. The mark he did not set.

I thanked him. Last night, when he did not mark me, I said thank you, and he said you are welcome, Natalie, and the thing I was thanking him for is killing him.

The chamber is quiet.

The speaker at the external wall is broadcasting. Tael is on the other side of the door. Tael is hearing this. Tael, who has been running his body at an off-register I have been clocking and not naming for days, is hearing Kesh Vorrin tell me he has been dying since the morning he walked into my office.

He recited his own death in the dark, with my mouth on his knuckles, and he called it later.

I put that away. Kesh does not get that fight. My mouth does not open.

I cannot make it open.

My hand on the scalpel is, for the first time since I palmed it, shaking.

“He has not told you,” Kesh says. Quieter. “I assumed he had. I assumed that the woman he pair-identified would have been told what the identification was going to cost him. That is the male I knew, at least. Apparently four years have changed him.”

“Four years.”

“Yes.”

“Kesh — how do you know this? How do you know the condition?”

A pause.

“Because I am dying of it.”

He says it plainly. No theater.

“My mate’s name was Mira. She died four years ago on an operation at Tyrre that your tracker was running for SRS. She was in the wrong corridor at the wrong minute. Your tracker refused to kill a child in the cargo hold. The refusal cascaded. My mate died in the cascade.”

The chamber is still quiet.

I cannot speak.

“I have been dying since. I was supposed to die inside eighteen months. I stayed at the place she died — Tyrre has a residual chemistry in the walls, she had been there long enough, the walls held enough of her signature that I could regulate. For some time. Two and a half years. Then the chemistry thinned. Eighteen months ago, I went into the active cascade. SRS had already terminated me. BioSystems offered a configuration in which my death would be useful. By month six I knew I was the subject, not the partner.”

The door in the corridor behind me makes a sound.

Not a slam. An impact. A body hitting something.

The first contractor.

I do not turn.