Page 41 of Tracked and Taken

“Muted.”

Ninth hour. Velarkis.

The scope shows the node. Dark. Powered down. A commercial relay seventy kilometers off the main transit lane, quiet in the specific way a node is quiet when it has been unplugged from every registry it was supposed to appear on.

Torres sits up. Her hands go to the forensic kit. Her spine squares. The Head of Station Security comes back into the co-pilot’s chair, and the woman who leaned a quarter-inch into my chest two hours ago folds herself back into a place in her body I am not, today, invited to.

“Brief me.”

The cover: Helia Mercantile, dried botanicals, four-year-old shell, courier-and-liaison on a routine pickup. The service station is three hundred meters off the main corridor. The rooms at the service station. That a male courier and a female liaison who do not share a room get flagged by any handler with a pulse inside six hours, and Torek’s trail is dead by Tuesday if we flag.

“We share a room.” I add.

A four-second pause.

“When did you add me to the manifest.”

“0430. Before you walked through my airlock.”

She looks at me for a long time, not the Head of Station Security and not the woman against my chest in the galley corridor. Natalie Torres is running a calculation across the male who decided how a day was going to go hours before she agreed to it and is, right now, waiting to find out whether she’s going with him. The calculation is visible in her eyes. So is the fact that she already knows the answer.

“It’s the cover,” I say.

“I know.”

“Is it the best cover.”

“Don’t make me say it twice.”

“I won’t.”

“We dock. Courier and liaison. We take the room.”

We dock.

The hatch releases.

The air coming through the seal is wrong.

A scrubbed facility smells like industrial cleanser and purge gas. This smells like cleanser and purge gas and a compound I recognize. Not the Harkin compound. Medical-grade. The sharp-sweet register of a sedation agent used to stabilize a biological organism during transport, the kind a field clinic uses when it needs to move a body that is technically alive but not cooperating.

Torres’s scanner is up. My overlay paints the compound across my visual field in pale-green threads, trailing down the corridor, concentrated in a smear on the bulkhead twelve meters in.

“Torres. This wasn’t a wiped node. It was a handoff. A medical handoff.”

She looks at the smear. She looks down the corridor. She looks at me. In the emergency amber her dark eyes are almost gold.

She raises her sidearm. I extend my claws. My left claw flickers. Retract halfway. Extend again.

The claws settle into the working configuration and stay there.

She does not comment on the flicker.

We go inside.

7

Second Party: Mate