Page 25 of Tracked and Taken

“Deleted.”

“Deleted, or noted and not deleted.”

“Deleted, Torres. Truly.” A beat. “The station archive retains the file by regulation. Anyone with your clearance can pull it. I mention this so that if a woman with your clearance were to request it at, say, 0200 on a morning when sleep proved uncooperative, the retrieval would not show up on my personal logs.”

“SENTRY.”

“I am being helpful.”

“Stop being helpful.”

“…Noted.”

I type the parts that fit on a form. The intercept. The wrench. The chain of custody. I note, because I have to, that I walked ten meters down the corridor for detainee transfer protocol, leaving the Draelith contractor in visual range of the subject for twenty-eight seconds. No verbal or physical contact. Subject resumed cooperative testimony voluntarily. Every word of it true. Every word of it leaving out what actually happened.

I sign. I submit. Up the chain to Morrison, who will read it at 2100 between the lines and ask me, if ever, in her own time. Morrison never asks early.

It is 1906. SNAG is waiting.

The SNAG office at 1920 smells like chamomile and the particular quiet of a case that just got bigger.

Flossie has tea on her desk and the notebook open. Xor stands behind her chair, tail around her waist in the evening configuration, the settled one, the one that has nothing to prove. Petra is at her desk with bear in her lap, chewing the end of a stylus, doing the particular Petra thing where she is not looking at me and is absolutely watching me.

Tael is in the reinforced chair.

He does not meet my eyes when I walk in. He does not need to. He inclines his head a quarter-degree, the correct, professional, entirely deniable acknowledgment of a woman who has just re-entered the room, and the inclination should not feel like anything, and does.

I am Junction One Security. I am here to brief.

“Harkin’s in Level Two holding. Testimony recorded. Chain of custody clean. Morrison has the report.”

“Velarkis relay,” Flossie says. Pen already moving. “Coordinates?”

I read them off. Flossie writes them down the way Flossie writes everything: brisk, economical, the handwriting of a woman accumulating a pattern she is not yet going to name out loud.

“Tael got corpo out of him,” I say. “Anonymous relay. Advance paid for a second job. No timeline.”

“Corpo.” Xor’s voice is flat the way a blade is flat. “Not government. Not criminal. Corporate.”

“Yes.”

“Mm.” Xor does not say SRS. Flossie does not say SRS. Petra looks up sharply and does not say SRS. Tael is deliberately not looking at anyone.

Flossie sets the pen down. Wraps her hands around her tea mug, the chipped one, the warm one, and looks at me with the specific brown-eyed expression that used to end OOPS dispatch arguments from three stations over.

“Natalie, lovey. Thank you.”

“For what.”

“Harkin. The assist. The intercept. The whole thing.” Flossie’s warmth is a physical object in the room. “We called you in to coordinate on jurisdiction and you handed us a named suspect, a signed confession, and chain of custody that a Corsairian liaison couldn’t poke a hole in if you gave her a week and a crowbar. We’ve got the node from here. You’ve done more than we asked.”

I do not know what to do with my face.

My face is a face that has been thanked, operationally, approximately once a quarter by Morrison, and this is not what Morrison sounds like. Morrison sounds like a debt being tracked. Flossie sounds like a door being opened with a pot of tea on the other side of it. I do not have a professional response for doors.

“That’s—“ I say, and stop.

“Mm?”