10. Compromised #2
“Flossie —“ My name. Not the courier. The name he gave himself permission to use in the bunk and has not stopped using since, and the sound of it now, cracked down the middle, is worse than anything he could do with his claws.
“The content of the message is — I have already determined the appropriate —“
“You have already determined.” I repeat it back. Flat. Let the words sit in the air between us until he hears what they sound like. “You’ve already determined the appropriate response to a message about me. Without telling me the message exists.”
His throat works. The tendons cord beneath the dark markings.
“Pull it up, Xor. Now. Or I ask Sprout to find it, and Sprout will find it, and Sprout will not be gentle about it.”
“I can confirm,” Sprout announces from the ceiling, orb cycling a hard, bright white I haven’t seen since battle mode, “that I have already located the archived transmission. I was waiting for one of you to arrive at this conversation. The Xarthian’s encryption is adequate, but my patience is not infinite. ”
Xor’s hand moves to the console. Slowly. Like a male reaching into fire. Three keystrokes. The archive opens. The secondary channel decrypts.
Nine words on the display.
Courier designated non-recoverable asset. Eliminate courier and secure container.
I read them once. I read them again. The words are efficient — SRS doesn’t waste language, Morrison always said that about them, the economy of organizations that treat people as line items. Non-recoverable asset.
A designation. A classification. The same vocabulary Xor used when he boarded my ship and called me the courier and looked through me like I was furniture with a heartbeat.
Except now my name is Florence Knight and the order to kill me was sent while I was lying in his arms.
The sternum goes cold. Not the ache — the ice.
The version Morrison trained into me, the crisis mode where feelings get filed for later and the body runs on competence alone.
I feel it happen. The warmth pulling inward, banking like a fire being covered.
My hands go still on my knees. My spine straightens.
“When did this arrive.”
“During the Merik call. Secondary channel, simultaneous.”
“How many hours ago.”
He swallows. “Six.”
Six hours. He has been carrying this for six hours.
Through the tea and the planning and the co-pilot’s chair and the route calculations.
Through how do you take it and you already know how I take it and the gap between our fingers on the mug that was a choice and the choice was the last discipline he had left and none of it — none of it — was the whole truth.
“Six hours.” My voice is quiet. Not warm.
The warmth is banked and what’s left is the Morrison underneath — cold, precise, operational.
I can hear it happening, and I can’t stop it and I don’t want to stop it because warm Flossie would crack right now and cold Flossie can keep this ship in the air.
“You’ve been sitting next to me for six hours with a kill order in your comms.”
“I was not going to —“
“I know you weren’t going to execute it.
” The words come out sharp. Certain. Because I do know.
I knew it the moment his claws retracted for me — both hands, all ten points, the body choosing gentleness.
I knew it in the bunk when his arm held me and his purr ran through my spine and his biology chose me before his brain caught up.
I am not afraid of Xor Xax. I have never been afraid of Xor Xax. “That is not the point.”
“Then —“
“The point is you sat here for six hours deciding what I get to know about my own survival.” I stand.
The chair gives on its rail. I don’t close the distance between us because if I get inside his heat radius right now my body will override my anger and I need the anger.
The anger is correct. “The point is that someone typed eliminate next to my name and you decided — you, alone, without asking me — that the appropriate response was to hide it and plan routes and drink my tea and sit in my chair and hope I wouldn’t notice that you were shaking. ”
“I noticed,” I say. “I noticed six hours ago and I didn’t push because I trusted you to tell me. I gave you time and you used it to protect me from information I had a right to have.”
His claws punch into the armrest. The polymer cracks — not the controlled crescent marks of suppression. The full force of a Xarthian in distress, splitting the material, and beneath his hands the armrest fractures and his face —
His face is wrecked.
Not the mask. Not the weapon casing. The male underneath.
The one who shook. The one who purred. The one who wrote makes me feel brave — no, I wrote that.
He read it and his hands trembled and he couldn’t get the shaking to stop.
That male. Staring at me with gold eyes that are wet at the edges and a jaw that is working on a word he cannot get out.
“I was not — the concealment was not —“ His voice breaks. Not cleanly. The processing failure, the ugly one, the narration going haywire. “Trell withholds information to maintain operational control. I was not — I did not intend to replicate — the comparison is not —“
I didn’t make the comparison. He made it himself. He heard his own actions and put them next to Trell’s and the collision is happening inside him without me having to say a word.
“I do not know how to do this.” The words arrive raw, pulled from somewhere that has no training and no framework.
His tail is hanging between the chair and the console, limp, the tremor running its full length.
“I do not know how to refuse an order and keep you alive and — the operational framework for protecting someone without controlling the information is —“ He stops.
His chest heaves. The purr starts — broken, wrong, not the steady vibration from the bunk but a stuttering, ragged thing.
“There is no protocol for this. I have no protocol for —“
He can’t finish.
The sentence dies in his throat. His framework has no architecture for what he’s trying to say, which is: I didn’t tell you because telling you meant watching your face change, and your face looking at me like I’m worth recording is the only good thing I’ve had in thirty years, and I chose five more minutes of it over your right to know, and I would make that choice again, and I hate that I would make that choice again.
He doesn’t say any of this. He doesn’t have to. His tail said it. His hands said it. The six hours of meticulous planning said it — the male who sat beside me building an escape route with the same hands that were carrying my death warrant.
My sternum aches. Under the ice, under the Morrison training, under the cold operational efficiency that is keeping me upright — the other thing.
The enormous, formless thing that has been growing since the dust belt.
Not warm. Not cold. Just large, pressing against the inside of my ribs, demanding space.
“You start,” I say, and my voice shakes on the word and I let it, “by not hiding things from the person you’re trying to protect.”
He looks at me. The wet at the edges of his eyes catches the amber cockpit light.
“I don’t need you to have a protocol. I need you to have a conversation.
With me. Before you make decisions about my life.
” A breath. The anger is real. It’s not going anywhere.
It exists alongside the other thing and both of them live in the sternum now, pressing against each other. “Can you do that.”
“Yes.” Scraped. Immediate. No hesitation, no qualification, no clinical assessment of the request. Just the word, pulled from the same place the purr came from.
“Again.”
“I will not conceal information that concerns your safety or your choices.” He swallows. “Flossie. I will not.”
My name. The promise. His wrecked voice. The purr guttering like a candle in wind.
I believe him. Not because the words are convincing but because his body has never lied to me — only his mouth has — and his body right now is a male who has cracked himself open on the truth and doesn’t know how to put the pieces back.
I sit back down.
Not next to him. In the co-pilot’s chair. My chair. A meter of console between us, the kill order still glowing on the display, his cracked armrest leaking polymer dust onto the floor.
The fury is banked but present. A low burn behind my sternum, sitting next to the other thing.
I will be angry about this for a while — not the kill order, I’ve been a courier in contested space for twelve years and people have wanted me dead before, the wanting is just logistics.
I’ll be angry about the hiding. About the six hours.
About the male who learned to shake and immediately used the new vulnerability to keep a secret.
But I’m here. And he’s here. And the kill order is on the table, which means we can plan around it, which means we are doing the thing Morrison trained me to do: feel later, fix now.
“Right.” I pull the display toward me. The nine words sit there, efficient and deadly. I look at them the way I look at nav charts — as coordinates, not a death sentence. “Trell. Not Merik. That’s worse.”
“Significantly.” His voice is steadier. The tactical brain re-engaging.
Not the mask — the real version, the one that works alongside the shaking instead of pretending it doesn’t exist. “Trell on a personal channel bypassing the handler cycle means he is running a parallel assessment. The window I estimated —“
“Is optimistic.”
“Yes.”
“How optimistic?”
“I do not know. Trell’s parallel processing is not predictable by standard metrics. The window may be twenty-four hours. It may be twelve.”