Page 51 of Fought and Found

She is correct. The purr has escalated since her fingers made contact with my skin. The resonance travels through my chest into her hands and I can see the goosebumps lifting along her forearms and the flush climbing her throat. She is close. Her collar has fallen open, and I can see the line of her collarbone and the shadow of the curve beneath and my claws cycle twice before I lock them in.

She threads the thermal needle through the suit edge. Her face is inches from my shoulder. Concentrated. The braid has escaped — loose strands against her cheek — and she tucks one behind her ear and the motion pulls her shirt taut across her chest and I close my eyes because the visual data is exceeding capacity.

I can feel her breath against the side of my neck. The warmth of it, the rhythm—slightly elevated from her resting rate, the measurement I have been cataloguing since day one and have now committed to biological memory. I can feel the heat of her scalp through her hair at four inches. I can smell her skin at this range with a precision that is unfair to us both: warm, close, the dark note that has been building in the cockpit since she stepped back from my mouth and is now, at four inches, operating directly on my bloodstream.

I am very carefully not turning my head.

"You can look." Quiet. The thread pulls tight. "I didn't say stop looking. I said stop staring at my mouth. Looking at the rest of me is —" She pauses. Considers. "Allowed."

I open my eyes. She is looking at me. Not my shoulder.Me.Brown eyes, warm, the Morrison assessment and the woman and the want all present and layered. Her fingers rest on bare skin. The thread is done, but her hand has not moved.

At this distance I can see the closed cut above her eye.

The thermal thread—my field kit, my thread—the edges held cleanly together. She has not mentioned it since I put it there. She has not drawn my attention to it and I have not drawn hers. But at this distance I can see it precisely and my chin adjusts—two degrees, three—angling my horn line to keep the point clear of the right side of her face. A small accommodation. She doesn’t notice. I do not announce it.

I simply know where it is, and my body builds around that knowledge without being instructed to. The weapon choosing gentleness without authorization. The most deliberate thing I have done in thirty years.

"Patched." Her voice is lower. "Like the first day."

Her thread in my shoulder. My thread above her eye. We are keeping each other closed.

"The first day I refused."

"The first day you didn't know how to let someone fix things for you." Her thumb moves. One slow stroke along the ridge of muscle, following the geometric marking toward my collar. The sensation tracks fire across my skin. My hand finds her hip — not a grab, a placement, my palm against the curve of her through the shirt, and she does not step away. She shifts into the touch. A inch closer. Her belly against my shoulder again. The heat of her through the thin fabric.

"You're learning," she says. Her thumb traces the marking another inch and my mouth falls open on an exhale that is not dignified and her lips curve and she steps back. Deliberate. The distance arriving like a door closing, and the absence of her warmth against my shoulder is physical loss.

"Reckoning first," she says. "Then Junction One. Then —"

"And then."

"And then." She sits back down. Crosses her legs. Her cheeks are flushed and her pulse is racing, and she is performing composure with the discipline of a woman who knows that if she touches me for one more second, the corridor and the pursuit craft and the villain on the comms will have to wait.

I conduct the assessment. Because that is what I do, even now — even with the ghost of her thumb on my shoulder and the taste of her on my tongue and the biological impossibility of objectivity. I assess.

I pull up Saar's deployment file on the secondary display. Standard Tier 1 operational package — mission brief, tactical parameters, extraction protocol. Agent Saar. Recruited two years after me. We sparred in the Tier 1 facility. Saar was fast. Precise. Good enough that I recommended the promotion.

Trell sent Saar to kill me — Trell, or whoever has learned to wear his codes, a distinction I cannot yet prove. Or to kill her and bring me back, which amounts to the same thing with different paperwork.

The file includes the standard recall notice. It is addressed to me by operational designation — not name, never name, Trell does not learn names until Tier 2 and even then uses them sparingly. The language is clinical.Agent Xax: Non-compliance confirmed. Report to Station Kosk for debrief and reassignment. Failure to report will result in asset termination protocol.

Asset termination. Not personnel. Not agent. Asset. The same language the kill order used for Flossie — non-recoverable asset. We are both line items now. Both inventory that has been written off.

"What are you reading?" She has noticed the stillness. She always notices.

"My recall notice." I turn the display so she can see it. No concealment. The promise. "Trell has classified me as non-compliant. The standard consequence is reassignment to a remote station, psychological reconditioning, and operational downgrade. The non-standard consequence — for a Tier 1 who has been compromised — is termination."

"They'd kill you."

"They would decommission me. The language distinction matters to SRS. It matters less to the person being decommissioned." I close the file. "I am not going back."

"I know."

"I need you to understand what that means." I turn the chair to face her. The corridor runs on autopilot — the mineral walls stable, the passage widening toward the exit. Her face in the amber light. The swollen lip. The brown eyes that see everything and file it and never forget. "SRS is the only structure I have had since I was sixteen years old. Before SRS, there were the Proving Dens. Before the Dens, there was — nothing. A family I cannot remember clearly enough to grieve. SRS recruited me, trained me, gave me rank and purpose and a function. They told me I was the best and the being-the-best was the only form of belonging I had left."

She is listening. Not interrupting. Not offering comfort. Listening the way she does — body turned toward me, eyes steady, hands still. The way she listens at case intakes that I have not seen but can imagine.Tell me what you lost, lovey.

"The pay is significant. Tier 1 compensation is designed to create dependency — the golden handcuffs, my colleagues call it, though most of them do not recognise the metaphor because they have never tried to take them off. The quarters are comfortable. The equipment is the best in the sector. Every friend I have — had — every social connection, every point of contact with another living being, runs through SRS infrastructure. Walk away from SRS and you walk away from everyone who has ever known your name."