Page 13 of Big Bad Red Protector

"He is my investigation partner."

“Those aren’t mutually exclusive, customs girl.” She lets the nickname land and moves on before I can object to it. "I have something for you. The payment routes I've been tracing from the diplomat transport operations—they surfaced again two days ago. Larger transfers. And the recipients aren't transport companies this time. They're meeting-space bookings in the abandoned residential sectors on sublevel twelve."

I write the coordinates she sends and look through the command room's observation window at Kheltor wrapping up the briefing.

"Someone is convening a meeting," she continues. "Cross-referencing the attendee signal traffic—it's fragmented andencrypted, but the device signatures are pulling from both Alliance military networks and Coalition diplomatic channels. Both sides, in the same room, in an abandoned sector, funded by the same account structure that's been moving your missing diplomats."

Both sides.

"When?" I ask.

"Forty-eight hours. Maybe less."

Kheltor's reaction to this information is exactly as cooperative as I expected.

"You will transmit the coordinates to my officers and remain in secured quarters," he says, without turning from his command screens.

"I found the connection between the meetings and the diplomat routes. I should be part of how we respond to it."

"You were attacked eighteen hours ago by two people who knew exactly where you were and what you were carrying." He pulls up a station map and begins marking patrol positions. "The coordinates stay in secure channels. You stay inside this block."

"You can't investigate a cross-faction conspiracy from inside a secured room?—"

"I am not inside a secured room. You are." He turns to look at me then, and the lines of exhaustion beneath the control are visible in a way they were not two days ago. He has not been sleeping. The evidence is in the set of his shoulders, the slight delay in his responses, the careful way he holds his neck. "The investigation continues. Your participation continues. Inside this perimeter."

We argue for another six minutes. He does not move, and eventually I run out of approaches that are not simple repetition.

I notice, when I am looking for something else, that he is holding his left side with the particular stillness of someone managing pain they have decided to ignore.

"You're injured," I say.

"I am functional."

"That's not the same thing." I cross the room before he can redirect me, because if I frame it as a request he will decline it and we will have another six-minute argument that ends identically. "Where?"

He is quiet for a moment that has more calculation in it than emotion. Then he moves his arm.

The injury runs along his left ribs—a burn score from the assassination attempt, deeper than a graze, undertreated and clearly several hours old. He cleaned it himself and applied a basic seal. The seal has held but not well.

I take the medical kit from the desk without asking. He does not stop me.

Working around someone Kheltor's size requires adjustment—his anatomy is proportioned differently, the skin texture of his forearm where I brace to hold the treatment applicator is rough in a way human skin is not, ridged along lines that probably correspond to something structural in Vakutan physiology. He does not move while I work. He does not speak.

But when the applicator passes over the deepest point of the burn and I have to press slightly to hold the seal, his breathing changes by a fraction that would be invisible if I were not standing close enough to hear it.

I finish quickly and step back.

"The coordinates Zevra sent," I say, because the silence needs purpose. "The meeting is in forty-eight hours. We have time to plan an approach that does not require me to sit in a room."

He looks at me in the way he sometimes does—like he is running a calculation he does not intend to share the result of.

"We have forty-eight hours," he says finally. "I will think about it."

It is not agreement. But it is the first sentence tonight that has not been a direct refusal, and I understand Kheltor well enough now to recognize the difference.

Zevra's voice clicks back into my earpiece as I leave.

"Both governments," she says, quieter this time. "In the same room. You understand what that means."