Page 68 of Tracked and Taken

I cycle it. She walks through without looking back. Her pulse, on my overlay, is at one hundred and six. Mine is at ninety-eight. The half-grin is the only thing on my face that the next four hours are going to have to work around. The silk is still on my fingertip. Whether she is wearing it is still unanswered and will sit under every operational second of Parr’s Anchor like a second pulse.

We walk into Parr’s Anchor.

12

The Airlock

Natalie

Parr’s Anchor smells like forty years of re-breathed air and somebody’s burned coffee.

The docking corridor is rust. Not the color; the actual metal, oxidizing at the edges where the atmospheric seals have not been replaced since the first refit. I walk behind Tael at two meters, close enough to see the rosettes on the back of his neck shift under the field jacket, far enough to give him the approach space a tracker needs. The silk under my tactical kit moves against my skin with every step, and my body has been keeping a running commentary I am refusing to acknowledge. The lace at my hips is worse. He did not ask. At the yoke, with his tail betraying him and his eyes pinned to my face like a discipline exercise, he did not ask whether I had put it on. I am letting him wonder. It is the best leverage I have held all case, and I am going to spend it slowly.

I am going to do the interrogation, extract the intel, and get back to the ship. Then I am going to revisit the commentary. Possibly with the male in front of me. Probably with the male in front of me. Definitely with the male in front of me, if he keeps walking at the pace of a tracker who is trying not to look back to check I am still there.

The concourse is the graveyard shift. Three Xarthians arguing with a Juneth server who has clocked the hour and is not pretending to care. A Krellan couple playing cards the way two people bonded many years play cards, half-attention, full of comfort. Freight-crew humans too tired to register us. We are invisible in the way two contractors in clean kit are invisible on a rust-periphery station. Nobody here knows my title; nobody is supposed to.

Tael, low, over his shoulder: “Deck three. Galley on the forward side. Corner booth, back to the wall.”

“Confidence.”

“Ninety.”

“Split at the lift. I’ll take the corridor approach.”

“Copy.”

Deck three. Forward galley.

I come in through the corridor door after Tael takes the direct approach. The man in the corner booth is human, forties, medium build, the tired eyes and the wrong shirt of a man running out the last hours of a layover. Back to the wall. Eye on the door. He has not touched his mug.

Tael walks in, and I watch Rethlor’s face do the thing I have seen on suspects picked up in customs mid-shift: not fear. Calibration. He does not reach for his sidearm. He does not stand. He pushes his mug six inches away from himself, hands visible, a small, clear gesture.

Tael sits across from him. I take the galley’s other exit, back to the wall, sidearm holstered, my hand where Rethlor will know where my hand is.

“Vosk.”

“Rethlor.”

“What are you doing at Parr’s Anchor.”

“I am sitting across from you.”

“I am on a rotation.”

“You are on an interrogation.”

Silence. Rethlor’s jaw works. His eyes flick to me, back to Tael, down to his own hands. He is weighing, and Tael lets him weigh. That is the part of the technique I have not seen before: he does not push. The single claw on his left hand stays extended on the table. He does not speak. He lets Rethlor’s own arithmetic become the room.

“Vosk. I cannot afford this conversation. I have a contract that depends on me not having it. And you have brought a partner I have never seen, which means this is not going through SRS channels, which means I have no procedural shield if it comes back.”

“I know, Rethlor.”

“…And you are still asking me.”

“Yes.”

A longer pause. His eyes go to the mug, past the mug, to the wall behind Tael’s shoulder.