Page 52 of Tracked and Taken

I reach for the second patch, because the second patch is the work and the work is what is keeping me upright, and as I reach across him I see the shoulder.

Wet. A long slash from the collarbone down across the deltoid, bleeding more than the shirt let on. He took it from the Grolic and has sat on it through the ribs and the purr and the mate conversation and has not once mentioned it. Of course he hasn’t. He took two blades for me and let me work on the visible one first.

My hands stop being unsteady because my body has decided to be furious instead, and furious is a thing I have muscle memory for.

“You took two.”

“I took two.”

“You don’t get to do that, Vosk. You don’t get to take two blades and call it operational and sit on the second one for ten minutes and purr at me through the patch like it’s a romantic comedy. Pick a register and stay in it.”

“I have picked a register.”

“What register.”

“The one I’m in.”

I have no response to that.

I press the second patch. The purr comes back at the contact, and he does not bother to suppress it. The rosettes on his shoulder move under my palm the way the ones on his ribs did, and my hand is on the bare shoulder. He took two blades so I would take none, and I am a woman who has spent four years running a rule that said caring was a luxury I could not afford, and the rule is, I can feel it through my palm and through the purr in the cockpit air, not holding.

I seal the patch. I do not sit back. I look at him and he looks at me, and we don’t look away for longer than I have held a look for anyone in five years.

I break it first, because I am running out of things to do.

SENTRY: “Charge neutralized. Confirm?”

JINX: “Confirmed. Depolarized. Six minutes twelve, with me on hardware.”

SENTRY: “Under my protocol.”

JINX: “Under my supervision. Port thrusters at ninety-four percent. One emergency burn is survivable, only forty minutes under load. Recommend immediate departure. Destination?”

Tael’s eyes come to mine. “I know a place.”

“Of course you do.”

“A cache. Old mining outpost, decommissioned, sixteen-minute jump. I refitted the main berth years ago. Not on anyone’s registry. Off the Velarkis grid.”

“You have a refitted cache sixteen minutes from a refitted kill zone?”

“Correct.”

“When were you going to tell me?”

“When we needed it.”

“I want to know about who that male was.”

“At the cache.”

“And the rest of what you said.”

“At the cache.” He holds my eyes. “Torres. I am bleeding on my couch and my biology is telling you the truth and your hands are pink at the cuticles with my blood, and the male who sent that team is watching us through a balcony I can’t see from this cockpit. I can have one conversation at a time. The first one is the jump. The second one is everything else. You’ll get the second one. I am not running.”

I sit with that.

“Sixteen minutes.”