Page 45 of Tracked and Taken

Not operational. I am, for two full steps out of the alcove, not breathing.

Four sweethearts. One mate. Every creature in that bar who remembers us is going to remember the courier who walked his mate out with his thumb on her skin.

The cover is taking up my spine and along several other lines of my anatomy the cover was not invoiced for. I am allowing it.

* * *

Service corridor off the main concourse. The C spur hatch at the end. Red maintenance indicator. Active lock.

We are alone. His arm comes off my waist the second we are out of the bar’s sight lines, and I register the absence of his thumb against my hip with an operational precision that is not operational.

“SENTRY. Log this. We are about to breach a sealed maintenance hatch without authorization. Vosk is authorized to cycle the lock via JINX. The authorization comes from me.”

“Logged.”

Tael looks at me. The smirk has gone. For the first time since we docked, his face is the face from the ship. The Vosk who works.

“Once I cycle that lock, my biometric signature is on the access record and your voice is on SENTRY’s log authorizing it. This is on both of us. Say it again, for the record.”

“The Head of Station Security at Junction One is authorizing a civilian contractor to breach a sealed maintenance hatch in an off-registry commercial relay for evidentiary access to a missing persons case. The breach is on me.”

“Logged,” SENTRY says. Crisp. With an edge, I do not hear from her often.

Tael nods once. JINX runs the code. The lock indicator goes green for forty seconds.

The hatch opens.

The C spur is lower-lit than the main concourse. Amber only. The acoustic dampening is heavier here; sound drops so hard that for the first five steps I am aware of my breathing and nothing else.

Tael takes my hand.

No warning. His palm slots into mine with the assumption that he has been given permission, and his fingers thread mine, and his grip is not a cover grip. He grips his female’s hand in a corridor he knows is dangerous, and his thumb has found the inside of my wrist where my pulse runs, and my pulse is running high, and he knows. There is no audience here and the absence does not make him let go.

I squeeze once. The signal of a Head of Station Security acknowledging operational receipt of a physical communication she has decided, for reasons she will examine at a later date, not to contest. The squeeze is also an answer. I leave it at that.

He squeezes back.

The corridor has seven chambers. Tael pauses at each door, head tilted, scenting. Six clean. At C-7 his head comes up and his shoulders do the quarter-inch drop, and his hand in mine goes still.

“Here.”

He lets my hand go. Slowly enough that my hand registers the release as a separate event from the opening of the door.

Four meters by three. Amber lighting. Acoustic dampening on every surface. In the center of the deck plating, bolted through the composite into the structural spar below, is a steel restraint anchor. Two mounts, one higher, one lower, positioned for someone tall standing and seated when compliant. The paint around the bolts is unweathered. This is not hardware a person puts in a relay node unless the person is in the business of holding living things in place for extended periods.

My stomach does a thing it has not done at a scene in years.

“SENTRY. Chamber C-7. Restraint assembly, deck-mounted. Beginning four-angle photography.”

“Logged.”

I kneel and photograph the anchor. I lean in for the side plate. The manufacturer’s stamp is in the shadow line, and I have to angle my light to read it, and I am kneeling on the tile with the cardigan bunched at my waist and the field kit open beside me.

Tael steps up behind me.

He braces one hand flat against the bulkhead above my head, the weight of him over me, the specific geometry of a six-foot-five male standing over a kneeling female while she does a procedural task. His other hand comes down to rest on my hip. Through the cardigan. Light. Flat. The same configuration as the corridor on the ship, and my body remembers it.

I do not move.