Page 170 of Tracked and Taken

He walks me through it. The noodle stand. Ardent choosing it out of fourteen options. The unchanged nod. The small math of a male who saw the mark before he sat down and calibrated his approach to make sure Tael clocked he hadn’t looked. And the thing his own body told him at twelve meters, which he says plainly and does not dress up: the scent was wrong. Tael had a read, not a file, and he doesn’t walk into my professional life with a read on a man I’ve trusted for three years.

“You came to me first.”

“I made you a promise four nights ago. The promise is mine, not Flossie’s.”

I look at him for a long time.

There was a way I expected my career to go, set out in a corridor I had walked alone for fifteen years. None of the men I’ve worked with would have stood in this office at 1903 to keep a four-night-old promise about a man I trusted for three years.

He is doing it.

“Thank you, Tael.”

“Mm.”

“What did JINX find?”

His face goes operational.

“Comms metadata. A recurring secure channel. Registered to one of the open Junction One frequencies he is, by your protocols, authorized to use. Encryption layer JINX cannot crack. Not Junction One. Not STI. Not any SRS layer I’m aware of. Active fourteen minutes every Thursday at 0230. Active every Thursday for the last seven months.”

The room tilts a second time.

This time I let it.

I spent the day bonded to a male whose senses I trust, but never considered those senses have been picking up something in my deputy that I have, in three years, not.

Worse: I have spent the day being a Head of Security whose deputy has been, on a closed channel I cannot read for the last seven months, and put the station in his hands.

I am briefly angry.

Not at Ardent.

At myself.

Tael registers the set of my face and does not comment on it.

“How sure?”

“I would not bring it to your desk if I were not sure.”

“All right.”

I think for a few seconds.

“Tael. We don’t loop Morrison yet.”

“No?”

“Not until we know who he’s talking to. Not even her.”

“No, sweetheart. Not even her.”

“Closed-loop. SENTRY and JINX only. Not on the joint-coordination archive. Flossie has access to it because the case is hers, but the file goes nowhere else.”

“Yes.”

“SENTRY.”