Page 18 of Tracked and Taken

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. Stand over there.”

I stand over there. The corridor is narrow, eighteen inches between where she is and where I have been assigned, and the arrangement puts us close enough that the steady low heat of her body, five degrees below my baseline, is a map my senses draw without permission. Her warmth on my left. The cold metal of the bay door on my right. My entire thermoregulatory system making calculations that have nothing to do with Harkin and everything to do with how little it would take to close the gap, put my hand on the wall beside her head, and find out what that pink skin tastes like.

She pulls up the detention protocol on her tablet. Skims it. Marks two sections. Standard. It should not be this attractive. It is.

“Torres.”

“What.”

“A word on methodology.”

“The methodology is on the screen, Vosk.”

“The methodology is procedural. I’m offering an adjunct.”

She doesn’t look up from the tablet. “Offer.”

“Harkin is going to close. I watched the Bay 7 footage. He had eye contact with someone on comms during the gap; he wasn’t acting alone in the loop; he was acting on instructions. Males who act on instructions lawyer up when the instructions run out. He’ll be shut inside ninety seconds of you reading him the rights.”

“That’s a prediction.”

“That’s a pattern. I’ve interrogated males with this jaw. They are expensive to crack through procedural channels.”

“So?”

“So. You run the detention clean. By the book. I stand in the corner. When he closes, and he will close, you walk him down the corridor for thirty seconds. I stay with him. No words. No contact. I stand there and let him look at me and I let him think through what a Draelith tracker with SRS history might consider doing to a man who cost the woman in charge of this station four years of sleep. When you come back, he talks.”

“No.”

“Torres.”

“No.” Her eyes come up from the tablet. “Vosk. No. I walk into a station corridor with a detainee and I leave him alone with a civilian contractor whose SRS termination file I am still reading, and any competent defense attorney walks him out on coercion within forty-eight hours. The whole case collapses. Harkin walks, his handler goes quiet, Maren dies. No.”

“I’m not going to touch him.”

“He doesn’t have to be touched to make the argument.”

“Then it’s not the argument that matters. It’s what he tells me.”

“Vosk. I said no.”

The jaw is set. A career of Military Police staring down a Draelith offering a shortcut in a service corridor, and there is not an inch of give in her. I hear what I hear: a woman who has stood over the bodies of cases that died through shortcuts, and has decided that dying slowly through channels is the only dying she is willing to participate in. Authority on her looks like something I want under my hands.

“Understood.”

“Is it?”

“It is.”

“Then stand over there and let me run the detention.”

I stand over there. My tail is in a spiral. My claws are retracted. My working configuration is fully engaged, and I am not, at any point in the next nine minutes, going to improvise. The effort of not improvising is already costing me.

“Positions.” Torres, to her officers. Clipped. In command. The voice that runs a station.

The bay door opens.