Page 148 of Tracked and Taken

I sit behind my desk, which is the reversal that tells me Morrison is, this morning, doing me a courtesy. Sitting is a more complicated operation than it was yesterday. I do not let that fact reach my face.

“Quick, you said.”

“Quick. I have a 0900 in Sector Three with a freighter captain who tried to register a cargo of decorative pyrotechnics as agricultural sundries.”

“Were they.”

“They were, in the formal sense, dried biological matter, yes. They were also, in every useful sense, bombs.”

“So agricultural in the way you and I are agricultural.”

“Precisely.”

She drinks her coffee. Her eyes go to my throat. They stay for one second. They come back.

“Torres.”

“Director.”

“Tell me how you are.”

Not the routine question. Not the briefing question. The question Morrison reserves for two people in her command chain, and which she has, in four years, asked me twice before this morning.

“I am all right, Director.”

“Bonded.”

“Yes.”

“To a Draelith.”

“Yes.”

“Inside six days.”

“Yes.”

“Including the part where the bond was nearly forced on you in a chamber at Iris-Nine by a male you did not consent to.”

The mark at my throat goes warm the way it goes warm when the bond reads my body remembering Iris-Nine.

“Yes, Director.”

She sets the mug down.

Morrison with the mug in her hand is Morrison in control. Morrison with the mug on the desk is something else.

“Torres. I am sorry.”

Morrison has not, in the four years I have worked under her, said the word sorry in any register that meant it.

She means it.

“You went into a room where I should have had better intelligence on before you walked through the door. You came out of it with a forced-bond protocol two minutes from completion and a male you had known for five days as your last operational firewall against a chemistry that does not negotiate. The fact that the chemistry between you and Vosk turned out to be the one you wanted is, Torres, luck. The good kind. But it is luck. And the next operative who walks into one of those chambers is not, by any guarantee I can give them, going to come out of it as well as you did.”

“I know.”

“I have spoken to Florence at SNAG. The pattern in her notebook. The four cases. The equipment label. And the geometric mark.”