Page 7 of Tracked and Taken

“You checked whether air has jurisdictional status.”

“JINX checked. JINX is thorough about loopholes.”

JINX, unmuted and audible: “I am. It’s a gift.”

She doesn’t laugh. But something happens at the corner of her mouth, a micro-movement she catches and kills so fast that human eyes would miss it. I’m not human. I catch it and I want to see it again, which is what gets trackers killed, and I file it under later because never is already full.

She shifts her weight. The boots repositioning in my periphery, and the shift carries a fresh pulse of scent down through the cold air—soap, skin, the specific warmth of her—and my overlay blooms red in a way that has nothing to do with Xarthian trace. Heat floods my core. My cock throbs once, hard enough that I have to lock my jaw against the sound that wants to come out. My tail, which has been behaving, twitches. Once. A single involuntary flick of the working configuration, and if she looked down right now, she would see a Draelith tracker lose a fight with his own tail on her deck plating in the middle of an active investigation while his body is still trying to decide whether to rise or stay on its knees.

She doesn’t look down. She looks at the loading dock, already working. The forensic kit on her hip, the gloves going on, the dark braid tight against her skull and the scar catching the light, and the regulation uniform that should by every operational standard be the least interesting thing in this bay.

I get to my feet. Slowly. Adjusting my tail on the way up because my tail is not cooperating with the concept of workplace appropriate, and neither is the rest of me. Standing puts us on comparable elevation and—this is the critical part—points certain parts of my anatomy toward the cargo bulkhead rather than the Head of Station Security. The fabric of my pants is doing nothing to hide the problem; I can feel the heat of it, the heavy press against the seam, and I force my breathing even while my overlay keeps painting her scent in thicker and thicker strokes across every surface of the bay.

Operational. Focus.

“What have you found?” She’s pulling on gloves. Not looking at me. Looking at the bay.

Good. Excellent. Perfect.

“Xarthian male. Four months degraded. Sedated before he reached the dock; the scent concentration says stationary, not ambulatory. They carried him or walked him and he wasn’t fighting.” I shift along the deck, putting professional distance between us, following the crimson toward the loading mechanism. The distance does nothing. Her scent is still in my mouth. “The trail ends at the loading dock. Doesn’t continue into any corridor, any maintenance shaft, any access point. He left this bay by ship.”

“Which matches the maintenance ship on frame 4,471.”

“And there’s something else.” I crouch at the edge of the loading platform where the crimson pools deepest. Underneath the Xarthian signature, woven through it like a stain through fabric: something pale. Synthetic. “A chemical overlay. Not biological. I can’t identify it at this level of decay, I’d need a fresher sample or lab analysis, but it shouldn’t be here. Xarthian scent doesn’t carry synthetic overlays unless someone introduced one.”

“Introduced how?”

“Administered. To him. Before or during the extraction.” I stand. The tracker is finished. The male is still hard and trying very hard not to think about the fact that she is close enough that if she took one step left, her hip would brush the place where my body is refusing to calm down. “Someone dosed a Xarthian male with an unidentified synthetic in this bay and then put him on a ship that isn’t registered to anyone real. That’s not opportunistic.”

“It’s targeted.”

“And whoever did it has access to xenobiological pharmacology, or hired someone who does. This was planned by people who study their targets before they move.”

Torres goes still. Completely still, the way prey goes still except she’s the opposite of prey, she’s a female whose hands have stopped moving and whose chin has lifted and whose entire body is radiating the controlled fury that does something to my circulatory system I’m not prepared to examine. The fury lives in the line of her throat, the white of her knuckles, the way her shoulders have locked. It makes her look dangerous and beautiful, as if she could take whatever she wanted if she ever stopped being careful. She’s looking at the exact spot where the crimson pools, and her expression is the one I’ve seen on soldiers standing over ground they were supposed to protect.

“While you were reading the air,” she says, and her voice is level the way a blade is level, “I was reading the bay.”

She walks me to the loading dock clamps. Tool marks. Someone manually overrode the docking mechanism, bypassed the automated log so the system never recorded the maintenance ship’s arrival. Clean work. The override you don’t learn from a manual; you learn it from doing it, or from someone who’s done it.

“That’s not opportunistic,” I say. “That’s tradecraft.”

“Yes.”

She straightens. Moves to the cameras. Pulls up the calibration log on her scanner and turns the screen so I can see it.

“The standard diagnostic cycle is twenty minutes. That’s the gap I’ve been requesting equipment to close.”

“I know.”

“On the night Torek vanished, the cycle wasn’t twenty minutes.”

The cold in the bay gets colder. Not temperature. The internal drop when a case stops being theoretical and starts being something worse.

“How long.”

“Twenty-six.”

Six extra minutes. Long enough for the maintenance ship to finish its work and clear the bay before the cameras came back online. Not a vulnerability exploit. A modification. Someone reached inside her system and gave them those six minutes.