Page 118 of Tracked and Taken

Flossie on the comm.

“Vosk.”

“Flossie.”

“Morrison’s team is wheels-up out of the Junction. ETA your position two hours fifteen. Luzrak is leading the boarding party. Three medical staff, four field assessors, two Junction security. They are coming with their own cutter and a transport for the bonded mates.”

“Copy.”

Two hours fifteen. The number sits wrong until the arithmetic finishes, and then it sits worse. Five days of running. Velarkis, a wiped relay node, a cache on the periphery, a service station that appears on nobody's registry, fourteen hours of dark on the approach. And the facility at the end of all of it is a straight burn from her own dock, closer to her office than the Cygran belt Petra flies for supplies. Whoever built this did not hide it far away. They put it where the traffic already was and let the route do the hiding, and my mate has been signing off on the corridor around it for four years.

“Tael. You are not staying.”

“No. The chambers are tagged. The manifest is sent. The console core is in my evidence bag. Kesh’s body is documented and bagged. Natalie needs medical and she needs to not wake up in a BioSystems-stamped facility.”

“Copy. I will brief Luzrak on entry. He will run scene control. You go.”

“Thank you, Flossie.”

“Take care of your mate, Tael. See you soon.”

The line cuts.

I punch for the Junction One vector. JINX has the pre-launch check already running. The drive engages. The station recedes in the rear scope.

SENTRY arrives on my channel with no preamble and none of the prim.

“Tael. Her temperature is 39.8 and climbing. Pulse 141, irregular. This is not the compound. This is new.”

I am at the bunk before the sentence ends.

She is wrong to the touch. Natalie runs five degrees cooler than me — it is the first fact my hands ever learned about her, the gradient my whole body has spent five days calibrating around. My palm lands on her shoulder and the gradient is gone. She is burning at my temperature. A human, at my temperature.

“JINX. Talk.”

“The counteragent. It is broad-spectrum across Draelith-equivalent metabolisms. Human metabolism is not Draelith-equivalent. Her liver is taking the formulation apart into something her body is treating as an attack. I flagged the risk, Tael. I had no data. I still have no data.”

“Fix it.”

“I cannot fix it. Two vials remain. A second exposure could arrest the reaction by displacement. It could also double it. I cannot model it.”

Her back arches off the bunk. The seizure is short. Eleven seconds. I hold her on her side through it, one hand at her jaw and one at her hip, and I have broken males with these hands, and there is nothing in this cabin for the hands to do.

My claws are at full extension. Involuntary. The body arming itself against a threat it cannot reach. I hold my mate through a seizure with eight blades half an inch from her skin, and when it passes, I drive them into the deck plating rather than let them stay near her. The plating takes eight thin scores.

I have never hated my own hands before.

“Natalie. Stay.”

Her pulse on my overlay: 150. 154. Irregular at a rhythm that does not have a rhythm.

My overlay is red from edge to edge. Every number I have trusted my life to, flashing at thresholds, and not one of them is a thing I can put a blade in.

I have tracked ninety-four percent of everything I have ever been sent after. I could find her on a station of three hundred and forty thousand by the salt of her skin alone. And I am kneeling at my bunk with a wet cloth and a half-empty med-kit while the one signature that matters burns out of calibration in front of me, and there is nothing to track.

The threat is inside her.

My whole life is a skill that is useless in this room.