Page 158 of Tracked and Taken

Junction One Security deputies wear uniforms on shift and civilian kit off, and the kit is its own message. On this deputy on this afternoon, it is a lie.

His pulse is steady, his shoulders loose, his pace that of an off-duty deputy on a lunch break. Every other organ in his body, by what I can pick up at twelve meters, is on a stakeout.

And under the kit, riding ahead of him through a market that smells of chai and hot oil and four hundred bodies, there is something on him that does not belong to him. Not sweat. Not fear. A thin chemical register sitting at the back of everything else, stale, days old, the way a solvent gets into cloth and then into the skin under the cloth and stops coming out in a wash. Draelith taxonomy has a word for it. The word translates poorly. The nearest human one is unclean, and it is not a judgment, it is a category: a body carrying the smell of a place it has been standing in, when the place is not the one on its shift roster. My sinuses file it before the rest of me has decided what it is for. Three years on Natalie’s command, clean record, two commendations, and a man does not walk to lunch wearing the back rooms of somewhere else.

There are fourteen lunch options within a hundred-meter radius of this radial. I have mapped every one of them. He has chosen this one.

The noodle stand his boss is sitting at, at the table she pre-filed her order at, with her bonded male at her side and her mate’s tail on her skin.

His eyes do not, in his approach, go to her throat.

Renn clocked the mark this morning at the lift junction. Tev clocked it at the chai stand. The two officers at the other noodle place clocked it ten meters back. Half a second is involuntary. Bonded marks are visible. People look.

This man does not.

Which means he saw it before he started walking.

Which means he calibrated the approach so I would clock that he had not.

Which is, by every instinct I built in nine years at SRS, a male telling another male he does not recognize the claim.

My tail wants to tighten. My canines want the air. I keep both where they are. I do not look at her throat for him. I do not need to. It is mine. He can pretend it is not. The pretense is the problem.

JINX, on the private channel: “Logged.”

I do not respond.

The man arrives at the table.

At two meters, the chemical register does not resolve into anything cleaner. It sharpens. Whatever he has been standing in, he has been standing in it long enough that it is under his collar.

I know him from one prior encounter. The night he came into SNAG to take handover from Natalie before we left for the mission. I clocked him then. I ran a quiet pull through JINX before the lift had finished descending.

What I have on him: three years as Natalie’s deputy, a clean record, two commendations, a divorce four years ago, a sister seven jumps away. What I did not, in that pull, run a check on, is what he does when the female he works under belongs to someone else.

I am getting the answer now.

“Boss.”

“Ardent.”

His brown eyes come to me.

“Vosk.”

“Ardent.”

The Vosk he gives me is calibrated to the register he ran on me at 1952 at the handover. Contractor of slightly elevated significance. The same one. As if the mark on his boss’s throat is furniture.

I let it sit.

The nod I give him back is not warm. It is not cold. It is the nod a Draelith gives a male who has walked up to his mate and chosen not to see her.

He hands her a datapad. The morning watch report. She skims. She signs.

“Anything I should know.”

“Permit dispute on Level 6 has developed a structural component. One party is building a fence.”