Page 3 of Tracked and Taken

“Seventeen minutes of the twenty unmonitored. Long enough for a sedation, transfer, and departure if the extraction team was prepped.”

“Which they would be, if this was corporate extraction protocol.”

“Which it was.”

The register shifts between us. My structural analysis meeting his operational knowledge, the banter still running but with its teeth pointed at the case instead of each other.

“The ship departed through the commercial lane. Not the freight lane.”

“Commercial lanes have lighter screening.”

“Commercial lanes have my screening. Which is not light.”

“Your screening is thorough for standard commercial traffic. Corporate extraction vehicles are designed to read as standard. That’s the point.”

“Then my screening needs to be better than the point.”

He looks at me. Straight. No smirk, no performance, no angle. A look which would get a male arrested in certain sectors and promoted in others.

“Yes. It does. And you already know that, because you asked for the equipment four times.”

His forearms are on my desk.

When did he lean forward?

He’s tracing the departure vector on the display, finger following the ship’s path through the commercial lane, and his sleeves are pushed to his elbows and the rosette markings travel down the inside of his forearms to his wrists, charcoal skin patterned in dark whorls that shift under the fluorescent light, and a thought arrives which has nothing to do with departure vectors.

The display. The trajectory. The data.

My hand finds the desk’s edge and grips it. Two seconds. Three. The tendons go taut against the composite, and the thing the hand wants to reach for is inappropriate and attached to a civilian contractor with a termination file I’m still reading.

I let go. Breathe. Study the display.

SENTRY says nothing in my earpiece. SENTRY is programmed to flag biometric anomalies that indicate a security threat, and my grip strength spiking while looking at a Draelith’s wrists apparently fails to meet that threshold. The AI and I are going to have a conversation about its alert parameters.

His tail shifts behind the chair. When he sat down, it was coiled in a controlled spiral. Tight. Deliberate.

It’s not tight now.

The coil has loosened. The ridged underside is visible where it rests against the chair leg; the muscle unwound in a way that looks involuntary.

The ridges catch the light. Textured. An irrational thought arrives. What would it feel like under my fingers? My hand presses flat against the desk to keep it where it belongs.

Through his comm, unmuted, which is an oversight or a choice I haven’t decided whether to punish, comes a voice. Higher-pitched, synthetic, vibrating with the focused enthusiasm of an AI that has never encountered a boundary it considered relevant.

“Her security architecture is exceptional. Organized by date, cross-referenced by threat category, with a tertiary index I have not seen outside of military intelligence databases. I am reluctantly impressed.”

SENTRY, in my ear, with the precisely controlled fury of an AI that has discovered someone going through its things: “The Draelith’s AI is accessing my system architecture without authorization.”

“Vosk. Your AI is in my system.”

“JINX is networking. It’s what he does.”

“Networking without authorization is a security breach.”

“Networking with authorization is a meeting.” He tips his chin. “We’re having a meeting.”

SENTRY: “The Draelith AI has left a data packet in my inbox labeled ‘PROFESSIONAL COURTESY.’ Shall I quarantine it?”