Page 42 of Tracked and Taken

Natalie

As we walk down the corridor, I go over the cover one last time in my head.

I am Nat Reyes, two months on contract to Helia Mercantile, human, boring, the logistics liaison a dried-botanicals courier picks up on station layovers to handle his manifest reconciliation. Forged paperwork in a hip bag. Sidearm at the small of my back, under a cardigan a size too big. A manifest case over my shoulder that opens into a field forensic kit in three clicks, because Junction One security regulations do not leave a kit on a ship I am walking away from.

The courier is Rook Malvern. He picked Rook the way a male picks a name he would have used on a different life if someone had given him the chance to have one, and he said it to me in the last hour of transit with his boots on the console and a smirk I recognize as the smirk that appears when he has decided something and is letting me catch up.

“Rook Malvern, sweetheart. Try to look impressed.”

I did not look impressed.

Rook Malvern is standing behind me now with his hand not yet on me, and I am going to have to forgive myself later for believing, for even one hour of the transit, that he was going to stay on the script.

I had filed a dead node when I should have filed the place as a working waystation.

Six other ships are docked. Two Jixian freighters whose manifests the keeper is going to stamp regardless of content, a Draelith independent flying solo who takes one look at Tael and is somewhere else, two Xenari in open structural disagreement with the concept of law, a human hauler with the pinpoint pupils of someone four hours into station stims. Not a dead node. A service station on a route that does not appear in any registry SENTRY has, and which has, per the traffic I am looking at, been on nobody’s registry for years.

The keeper is at a counter in the central concourse. Jixian. Gray-scaled, narrow face, milky nictitating membranes sliding sideways across yellow eyes. The flat uninterest of a being who has outlasted several owners and three re-flaggings by not asking questions and not remembering faces.

He does not look up when we walk in.

“Couriers.”

“Manifest pickup,” Tael says. Easy. The voice has done this run before. “Helia Mercantile. Box 47.”

“Ship name.”

“Helia’s Reach.”

“Operator.”

“Rook Malvern.”

“Second party.”

“Mate.”

Mate.

The word lands in the concourse with the flat weight of an off-script beat, and the Jixian does not flinch, and he writes it on the ledger because mate is a legal Draelith commercial designation for a bonded-business partner under Velarkis registry conventions, and the designation is ambiguous enough to sign across.

Tael did not say liaison. Rehearsed. Agreed on. He skipped it.

I narrow my eyes at him as heat climbs the back of my neck. The slow heat of a woman whose face does not blush and whose neck, apparently, does, and whose courier has just, at the first opportunity of the cover, deployed a word SENTRY read me from a file two nights ago in a voice she uses when she is being helpful, and Tael is using it now on a manifest in front of an alien who cannot possibly know what the word is doing to my internal operational systems. I do not know if he chose it for the cover or because he wanted to hear how it sounded in this room. I will not ask.

Tael knows, and although he’s not looking at me, the corner of his mouth moves.

The Jixian stamps the ledger. “Name.”

“Nat Reyes.”

He slides Tael a chit. Tael takes it and then his hand goes to the small of my back.

Flat palm. Through the cardigan. Through the shirt. Warm the way a Draelith is warm which my nervous system is suddenly very interested in. I do not step away. The cover requires contact. That is what I tell myself while my pulse answers the weight of his hand.

“Thanks, sweetheart,” Tael says. Mild. Pitched for the keeper to hear under the casual roll someone does not raise his voice because he does not need to.

Sweetheart. Mate. Fine. Later, Torres.