Page 34 of Tracked and Taken

JINX, unmuting himself exactly on schedule: “Environmental modification detected. Cockpit temperature reduced 3.2 degrees. I am logging this as a domestic adjustment.”

SENTRY: “Logging as operational accommodation under coordination protocol, Section Three.”

JINX: “Sentry, you are going to log everything about this trip as Section Three.”

SENTRY: “That is the correct section.”

Tael, quietly, in the pilot’s seat: “JINX.”

“Operational parameters only. For the duration of the transit.” A beat. “Per transit, however. Not per arrival.”

“JINX.”

“Noted.”

Tael settles into the pilot’s seat. Tail sliding into the footwell. His knee is eight inches from mine and will be eight inches from mine for the next nine hours, because there is no geometry of this cockpit that makes it closer.

I pull out a folder. Actual paper, because a hard copy cannot be quietly edited by whoever edited my camera schedule. I read. He flies.

Two hours in, the comm chirps. Flossie.

“Loveys. SPROUT has been watching the Velarkis node.”

“And?”

“It went offline forty minutes ago. Someone wiped it.”

Tael’s hands tighten on the yoke. My fingers tightened on the folder.

“Trap,” I say.

“Or cover-up.”

“Or both.”

Flossie, quieter: “Be careful, both of you. Something about this isn’t shaped the way I thought it was.”

SPROUT, earnest: “I am providing statistical validation, not comfort. Comfort is available upon request.”

“Thank you, SPROUT. I am refusing both.”

“Acknowledged.”

The comm closes.

Hours of transit corridor. A wiped relay node. A handler, and a handler’s boss, and a handler’s boss’s client somewhere in the dark at the end of this trail.

In the pilot’s seat, Tael’s scent layers into the recycled air like a second climate, and his knee is eight inches from mine, and his tail, in the footwell, is not rigid and not in the tight spiral. It is the other one.

Comfortable. SENTRY said. In the voice she uses when she is being helpful.

I flew into this trip to build a case. I have a file open that is not the case, and a tail I can apparently read now, and no intention of examining either one for nine hours.

“Nine hours,” I say. To the navigation display. To the stars. To anything that is not the male sitting to my left.

“Nine hours,” he says.

We fly.