Page 18 of Fought and Found

The courier looks at the orb. Looks at me. Looks at the console where our route glows in amber and white — built from her knowledge and my analysis, hers and mine.

“Xor,” I say. Low. The word stripped of rank, of title, of the flat reporting voice I used for Trell. Just a name, given the way you give a thing you’re not sure you’re allowed to hand over.

“My name is Xor.”

She smiles. I don’t. But my tail uncurls one inch from my leg.

Neither of us mentions it.

The crescent marks in my palms ache. The purr sits beneath my ribs like a grenade with the pin half-pulled. The dust belt looms on the display, amber and dense, and she is holding my name in the cockpit like it is a thing worth keeping.

I am going to complete this mission.

I am going to complete this mission.

6

The Touch

Flossie

Thecargobunkdoorhas been closed for eleven minutes, and I am running a threat assessment.

This is a professional exercise. This is exactly the kind of thing Morrison trained me to do — calm, systematic, before the adrenaline metabolism catches up with events. I have a sealed research container in my cargo hold, three merc signatures at long range, and a Tier 1 SRS operative in the bunk eleven feet aft of where I’m sitting. He has a biometric override chip in his left gauntlet. I watched him board with it. He walked to my cargo bay door, and he stopped, and he walked back, and I don’t know why he stopped.

That last part is the one I keep snagging on. I know why I was in that doorway — twelve years of courier work, every shipment myresponsibility until signed and delivered; the container is mine until Tessaro’s hands are on it. I know why I stood there with my mug and my hand near Betsy and every line of me saying go ahead and try.

I don’t know why he turned around.

The route display glows amber in the dark of the cockpit. Four hours to the dust belt entrance. Fourteen minutes at Gerald’s gap. The merc formation is holding at long range, no intercept trajectory yet. Everything is on track. Everything is fine. I have survived worse than this with less preparation, and Morrison’s voice in the back of my skull says: threat assessment before sentiment, Knight, the feelings can wait until you’re safe.

The feelings are not waiting.

He bled into his own hands last night because I called him beautiful. He bled — thin dark lines of crimson I only saw because I see things other people miss — and his voice broke on don’t. This morning he gave me his name like a peace offering, and he’s spent the whole day being flawlessly professional about it, and now the door is closed again, and I’ve been sitting here in the glow of the route display trying to remember the last time a word I said drew blood from someone, and it wasn’t because I meant it to.

He is a Tier 1 SRS operative. He is large enough to fill the entire width of my corridors. He has claws that extend to combat length and a tail that knocked over the Darjeeling tin and my ceramic menagerie without apparent effort. He could move me. Not quickly — I’m trained, Betsy’s on the console — but he could, and the fact that he hasn’t, the fact that he turned around at my cargo bay door, the fact that beautiful broke something in him that my blaster didn’t — that’s not the same as safe.

I know that.

I also know that I want to put my hands on the fuzz at the back of his neck, and these two pieces of information are going to have to coexist until we clear the dust belt, because the belt doesn’t care about my feelings and neither do the mercs.

I rebraid my hair. It’s the third time since yesterday’s fight. This one is because my hands need something to do that isn’t going down the corridor and knocking on a door that doesn’t seal properly to ask a Tier 1 SRS operative if he needs anything.

This is what Morrison means when she says I have the threat assessment instincts of a golden retriever.

The comms panel is dark. Morrison’s frequency is in the first preset — has been since my third month as an OOPS courier, when she told me the number and said call me if you can’t handle something, and I said I can handle everything, and she said that’s what worries me.

I look at the comms panel for a long moment. Morrison picks up at any hour. Morrison would listen, assess, tell me in twelve words or fewer exactly what the situation is and what I should do about it. Morrison has a protocol for hostile boarding, for compromised cargo, for operatives who don’t comply, for every difficult conversation I’ve had in twelve years of outer-rim courier work.

Morrison does not have a protocol for this. And even if she did — even if there were a procedure for what happens when the man sent to take your cargo turns around at the cargo bay door and bleeds into his own hands because you called him beautiful — I don’t want it. Whatever this is, I want to know what it is before Morrison names it for me. That’s new. I file that too, in the part of my chest where I keep the things I’m not ready to write down yet.

Sprout’s orb brightens from night-cycle amber to a thoughtful green-gold. I didn’t ask it to. It came on by itself, which means it’s been watching me sit in the dark and has decided I need supervising.

“Your heart rate has been elevated for forty-three minutes,” Sprout observes from the ceiling. “I mention this for your cardiovascular health.”

“Sprout.”

“Shall I log the cause, or would you prefer I use my discretion?”