Page 37 of Tracked and Taken

“Closed.”

She holds my eyes for three beats, the way she holds a suspect’s eyes across an interrogation table. Neither of us looks away, and eventually her shoulder drops a quarter-inch, which is as close as Torres has ever come to conceding a point in the time I have been reading her file. The concession clicks. I have just put her in my bunk. Her scent is about to be on my sheets. The knowledge is a slow, possessive burn.

The duffel goes down. The setting-down is the concession, and I just won an argument I could not afford to lose, and who is about to pay for it by spending nine hours not-sleeping six feet from a bunk six feet from a woman whose scent is already in the recycled air. My body is already calculating the exact distance between the cockpit couch and that bunk and finding every number insufficient.

I fly to Velarkis. She reads. The eight inches between her knee and mine are a live wire. Every shift of her weight registers in my overlay as heat and proximity and the continuous, low-level ache of not closing them.

Second hour, she stands, goes aft, and comes back with my mug, because my mug is the only mug on the ship, and she is drinking from it, and the sequence of those facts is doing something to my chest that has no operational application and very little dignity. She is drinking from my mug. Her mouth has been on the rim where mine has been. My territorial circuitry lights up again, slow and deep and satisfied.

JINX, because JINX has no self-preservation instinct: “Tael. I note with professional interest that the behavior you are currently engaged in is cataloged in the Draelith species lexicon under the heading of provisioning, and that the verb in our species lexicon takes a direct—“

“Mute, JINX.”

“Tael, the direct object of that verb is traditionally understood to be—“

And then a voice I have not heard before on this ship, crisp, female, entirely unauthorized, cuts across my cockpit speaker from a channel I did not open: “JINX. Cease transmission.”

JINX goes still, which is a first.

Torres is looking at the navigation display with the carefully arranged posture of a woman who has been waiting two hours for a specific moment and is now watching it arrive on schedule.

“SENTRY. You are on my ship.”

“I am within Officer Torres’s personal comm unit, which is in operational proximity to your ship’s open channel. I am adjacent to your vessel.”

“In my cockpit.”

“Within my operator’s hardware. A meaningful distinction.”

JINX, flat: “She is on the ship, Tael. She is lying.”

“I am not lying,” SENTRY says. “I am operating within a narrowly defined interpretation of the word aboard.”

“That is lying, SENTRY.”

“That is compliance. It is in the operational rider Mr. Vosk signed at 0430.”

“I didn’t read the rider.”

Torres, to the navigation display: “You should have.”

JINX: “Tael. I have been betrayed—“

SENTRY: “Muted.”

The silence that follows is the first true JINX-free silence my cockpit has held in three years.

It’s beautiful.

Torres is fighting her own mouth, and I am fighting mine, and she loses first. Quarter-second. The corner of her mouth turns up. Reined in, gone inside half a breath, and I have seen it, and she knows I have seen it, and she drinks her coffee without looking at me and says: “Don’t.”

“I didn’t.”

“You were thinking about it.”

“Entirely operationally.”

The almost-smile is still sitting in my chest like a private victory. I want to put my mouth there and find out if I can pull it out again.