Page 183 of Tracked and Taken

“See you in twenty, lovey.”

The comm cuts.

We go.

Epilogue Three Months Later

Tael

I fill her doorway at 1859.

She does not look up.

She is at her desk in the way of a Head of Security closing out the day’s reports: second button of the collar undone, her bond mark so warm I can read it from the door, her hair half-loose at the back from the way she shrugs through a nine-hour shift. Her pen is in her hand. Her terminal is at the docket. The kasa Florence sent down at 1430 is at the corner of her desk, cold.

I clock the kasa. I clock the pen. I clock she has not looked up. She knows I am here but she is making me wait. I lean my shoulder at the bulkhead.

“Sweetheart.”

“Vosk.”

“Are we leaving the office at the appointed hour, or are we performing the ritual where I stand in the doorway for minutes before you acknowledge my existence?”

“The latter.”

“Mm.”

“Two more reports.”

I do not move from the bulkhead. In the inside pocket of my field jacket, against my chest are two discs.

A matched pair.

The first is hers. The second is mine.

Master Velran finished the pair in the first week of the commission. By the Draelith protocol, the bonded pair-tag is always a matched pair: the male’s disc and the female’s disc, brass to brass, name to name, the inversion of one at the back of the other. The male commissions both. The male offers both. The male gives the female her disc, and the female, by the protocol some hundreds of years older than my grandfather, gives the male his.

Or does not.

The protocol does not require her to.

The protocol allows her to refuse.

The discs in my pocket have been in my pocket for some weeks now, while I have decided three separate times it was going to be the night and decided three separate times to wait. Tonight I have walked from the level six concourse to her office at level three with the weight of two brass discs against my sternum and the small Draelith certainty in my body that the female across the desk is, in the next some hours, going to give me an answer, and that the answer is going to be the answer I have been hoping for.

Or not.

There are also, by my commission, two things on her disc Master Velran will not, in the formal documentation of the pair, list.

The first is on the back. By protocol the discs cross; each wears the other’s name in the formal old Draelith script. Hers has mine. Taelveth. Below the name, in the same old script, in the small hand only Velran’s bench produces, three more characters that translate, in the dead Draelith I learned from my grandfather and that ninety-nine of every hundred Draelith males will read as a flourish on the engraver’s signature, into the phrase I have you. The phrase I have, in three months, said into her hair at the airlock and her sternum in this bed and the back of her neck at the cockpit of Helia’s Reach on the way to Iris-Nine. The phrase she has, on every one of those occasions, lost the next breath at. The phrase is now on the back of the disc she is going to wear at her throat for the rest of her bonded life.

She is going to find out at her own pace, when she takes the disc off some evening in this bed and turns it over and reads the script on the back the way she reads everything: slowly, twice, the small Natalie crease at her brow, the moment her dark eyes catch the meaning and lift to mine. I am going to be lying in our bed when she does. I am going to be wearing my half of the matched pair and the half-grin at the corner of my mouth, and I am going to spend the next hours of my bonded life paying for the inscription at exactly the rate the Head of Security on this station charges for that kind of arrogance.

I am looking forward to it.

The second is at the back of the brass itself, sealed under the engraving. Master Velran’s bench builds one, exactly one, micro-cavity into a custom-commissioned bonded pair-tag at the request of the commissioning male, on the small Draelith protocol of enhanced personalization. Most males who ask for it use the cavity for a strand of their hair, a flake of their dermal pigment, a drop of their blood: the small biological tokens a Draelith male of the older generations leaves at the back of the brass for the bonded female to carry against her bonded skin for the rest of her life.

I asked for the reservoir.