Page 172 of Tracked and Taken

The tea goes cold in front of me while the arithmetic does what arithmetic does. Five months of a Xarthian male awake somewhere, in the hands of people who had already decided what he was for, before anybody put him in a chamber. "So Iris-Nine was not the first room," I say. "It was the last one."

"That is what the page says." Flossie writes the word where at the end of the line and underlines it twice, the way she underlines the things she intends to come back to. "I have been staring at that gap since before any of you were on this case, lovey. I am staring at it still."

Flossie sets the pen down.

“Whoever is behind that label is collecting bonded pairs.”

Her dispatch voice. Connecting seven entries across three years in one breath.

“Bonded pairs is one read. Studying bonds is another. Collecting research is a third. Trafficking is another. The motive is unconfirmed. What is confirmed, after today, is that this is one operation and not seven.”

“One label on all of it,” I say.

“One label, lovey. And nothing behind the label that will hold still long enough to be looked at.”

I sit with that. I’m thinking somewhere in this list my deputy might know more. Whoever runs that label has the operator pattern, the resources, and the discipline. Ardent has an off-station closed channel I can’t identify. The two could connect.

The two could also be unrelated. A Junction One deputy who has sold what he sees, perhaps has more than one buyer.

I don’t know which it is and not knowing sits at the bottom of my stomach for the rest of the meeting.

“Tael.”

“Flossie.”

“You also have a separate file.”

“I do.”

He sets the datapad on her desk. Her eyes go to mine. I nod. She picks it up. She reads.

When she sets it down, she looks at me. Not at Tael.

“Lovey.”

“Closed-loop, Flossie. Not Morrison. Not the joint-coordination archive. Not yet. Tael and I have decided.”

She looks at me for a long moment.

“All right, lovey. Closed-loop.”

“Tomorrow we plan?”

“Tomorrow we plan.”

The corridor between SNAG and the lift. His tail at my wrist, and neither of us says anything, because there is nothing in tonight that a corridor is the right place for. The lift opens. The lift closes. The lift takes us up.

He walks me to my door.

The panel reads my biometrics.

The door cycles.

I step in. He follows. The door closes.

The lights come up at twenty percent.

I stand in the middle of my own quarters in the uniform of a Head of Security whose deputy, in the last hour, has become a closed-loop investigation.