Page 31 of Tracked and Taken

The next layer is the problem.

Off-station, in a contested sector, the uniform is a billboard that says: trained response asset, predictable training, predictable movement patterns, please target me accordingly. Every military-police instinct I have says civilian, and civilian means the back of the wardrobe.

I haven’t opened the back of the wardrobe in a long time.

I open it.

There is a whole life in there. A woman I used to be, when the job was in Orion Outpost which has restaurants and I had friends who were not subordinates and the rules of engagement did not include wearing armor to work. Soft shirts. Cut-for-me pants. A dark green dress I bought on leave and have never had an occasion for, and I look at it long enough to remember the shop and the afternoon and the woman who spent sixty credits on a thing to wear in a life she was not currently living, and I do not pack the dress.

I pack the cold-tea shirt. Soft v at the throat. Two more shirts, a dark gray, a deep burgundy, because I am not washing clothes in a cockpit galley if I can avoid it. The dark pants. The soft ones. Two pairs. A long, dark cardigan, the kind that passes for civilian and has enough pockets to hold a comm and a clip and a folded knife. Soft civilian shoes, broken in years ago and not worn since.

That is what a sensible woman packs for a contested sector.

I look at the wardrobe.

There is an inner drawer. Not deep. The drawer where a person who is not entirely a uniform keeps the things that do not come up in an operational context.

I pull it open.

There are three sets.

The cream silk, which is for a different evening and a woman I have not been in a while. I do not pack the cream silk.

The dark silk, I pack.

And the lace.

The lace is newer, worn exactly once, in my own quarters, to confirm to myself that I could still recognize the woman in the mirror. It is a two-piece. Dark. Not performative; performative is the wrong word, a word for a woman dressing for somebody. The lace is a woman’s private acknowledgment that she is a woman.

I pack the lace.

I pack it underneath the silk, which is underneath the shirts, which is underneath the pants, which is underneath the cardigan, and which will not be visible to anyone who happens to observe me unzipping the duffel for field rations or a comm unit or a spare clip.

They will not come up.

If they come up, they are going to be in the duffel, because a woman is allowed, at forty, on any given trip, to pack the things that belong to her without it constituting a statement.

I close the duffel bag. I sit on the edge of the bed.

“SENTRY.”

“Yes, Torres.”

“Door closed. No shared channels. Local to my quarters only.”

“Confirmed. Privacy mode engaged.”

“The file.”

“Which file?”

“You know which file.”

“The file JINX transmitted to me at 1944, currently quarantined in Received: Not Requested.”

“That file.”

“Torres.”