Page 169 of Tracked and Taken

1843. I sign the last of the day’s reports. I close the terminal.

The intake queue chimes. Last comm of the day.

Ardent.

Boss. Permit dispute on Level 6 has escalated to a fistfight. I have it. Have a good evening.

I send back: Copy. Don’t extract anyone unless the fence becomes load-bearing.

Boss.

He hasn’t said a word about the mark all day. Not in the morning handover. Not at lunch or the afternoon update. Not now.

Last year, the week the local merchants’ association ran a pop-up market in the south radial and I stopped at a stall and bought myself a small enamel pin in the shape of a ship that had no operational relevance to anything I was wearing, Ardent saw the pin from twelve meters and razzed me for three working days about my, by his pen, new aesthetic phase.

The mark on my throat is visible. The mark on my throat is also from the male who has become part of my life permanently.

Ardent has not said one word.

It bothers me.

I tell myself it bothers me because Ardent is being professional. I tell myself a few other things. I am still telling myself things when the knock comes at the door at 1859.

I open it.

Tael is in the corridor in his field jacket, looking more businesslike than I expected. My stomach lurches.

“Florence pushed tea to 1915,” he says. “I bought us five minutes inside first.”

I step back. He follows. The door closes.

“SENTRY,” I say.

“Privacy locked, Head of Security. Room only.”

“Talk.”

“After lunch I asked JINX to run a quiet pull on Ardent.”

The room tilts as if the floor under me is not the floor I thought it was.

I have been telling myself about the silence on the mark, the shoulder-stillness Tael ran beside me at the noodle stand when I said Ardent’s name, the comm five minutes ago that didn’t feel different because it wasn’t different, finds after one sentence, its referent.

I look at Tael. He waits.

“Talk to me, sweetheart.”

“I’m processing.”

“All right.”

“Thirty seconds.”

“Okay.”

I take the thirty. I take a breath. I look at the male standing in my office with his hand still at the panel where he closed the door. I take a second breath

“Walk me through it.”