Page 53 of Tracked and Taken

“Fine. Sixteen minutes.”

I stand. My knees do not quite hold for the first second. I take the co-pilot’s seat; he takes the yoke. The shield cycles green, the port thrusters spin up at ninety-four, and Helia’s Reach releases the clamps and angles up through the Velarkis cloud cover, and the node falls away into the rust-colored haze.

I sit with my cardigan rolled up over the dressing on my forearm and his blood drying on the shoulder of it and the word mate in my mouth like a coin I have not decided how to spend.

I do not look at him. I look at his hand on the yoke. Steady. The right has retracted to smooth black fingertips. The claws on the left are still half out. Even now, a male whose biology is telling the truth about him without permission.

He sees me looking, but I do not look away.

The jump drive engages, and his voice, low, just before the stars stretch, at a register I have not heard from him and which my body files as new:

“Sixteen minutes, sweetheart.”

It lands the way his hand did on my back at the keeper’s counter. Quiet. Deliberate. Still working under my skin long after the moment has passed.

9

The Cache

Tael

I just told her the truth.

I said mate to her face and meant it and refused to apologize. My purr has not fully died because she is three feet from me in the co-pilot’s seat, and the cocky version of me would like to lean across the cockpit and finish what the corridor and the patch started. The other version, the one that has been managing since she walked into my case, knows that what I do in the next ten minutes decides whether she ever lets me close again.

I do not move my hand. The discipline costs.

JINX, low: “Approach in eight. I am professionally noting that you have not blinked in six minutes.”

“Mute, JINX.”

Muted.

SENTRY, miraculously, says nothing. The cockpit is the quietest it has been since she walked through my airlock in a cardigan a size too big, and I lost the rest of my professional life on the spot.

She does not look at me but she does not stop looking at my hands.

The cache is a spartan rock at the Velarkis periphery, berths carved into the face, an airlock retrofitted into what used to be a mining supervisor’s office. I bring us in on sublight because the port thrusters will not survive a drive burn through the approach, and my overlay sweeps the docking ring and registers a heat signature inside.

I go still.

One occupant. Living. Adult male. Korrhai signature.

“Thane.”

Almost certainly.

Thane is in my cache, which means Thane is using the biometric override I gave him years ago, drunk, because I was alive specifically because of a thing he had done and the override seemed proportional. Thane is in my cache sixteen minutes from a kill zone I just walked out of, which is not a coincidence, which means something in his case brought him here ahead of me. And Thane is in my cache while I am bringing Natalie into it for the first time, which is the fact my body is having the most trouble with.

She reads my face.

“Vosk.”

“We have company. In the safe house. An old colleague.”

“Friendly?”

“Define friendly. He’ll clock everything and say nothing.” A beat. “He saved my life twice. He saved a child’s life once. He doesn’t ask questions he doesn’t want the answers to. He’s safe, Torres.”