19. Leaving Home #2
"Operative Saar." I use the designation because it is the last time I will use any SRS designation, and the formality is a farewell.
"Sprout has restored your craft—navigation, life support, sublight.
The weapons stay dark until you are beyond the Reach.
The intelligence reaches Trell and this ends cleanly.
It does not reach Trell and I will know. "
Saar nods. Once. Walks into the corridor toward the starboard airlock. A minute later the hull gives the double clunk of an umbilical releasing, and the last piece of SRS detaches from her ship and burns away toward a neutral station.
The Petal. The ship with the fairy lights and the tea stains and the co-pilot's chair that is mine now. Not SRS's. Not Trell's. Mine. Because she gave it to me and I took it and neither of us filed the paperwork because the paperwork does not exist for what we are becoming.
Flossie is in the corridor behind me. I know without turning—her heartbeat, her scent, the specific displacement of air that a five-foot-four woman in a daisy cardigan creates in a narrow space. Her hand finds the tip of my tail. Holds it.
"He'll deliver it," she says. Not a question.
"I do not know."
"But you think he will."
I think about Saar's face when I said I chose her.
The flicker. The question beneath the question.
SRS took the same things from all of us—different species, different methods, same result.
Saar is carrying a data chip and a piece of evidence that choice is possible, and I do not know if that is enough.
But he looked at the timestamps and understood what it meant—that he was aimed as a weapon by a hand he didn't know existed—and the understanding changed something behind the silver eyes.
"I think the briefing was incomplete," I say. "And Saar noticed."
She squeezes the tail-tip. We watch the empty corridor. Then she pulls me toward the cockpit. "Come on, lovey. We're on final approach and you need to not look like you've just committed treason."
"I have committed treason."
"Yes, but there's a way to do it with style. I'll teach you. Step one: cardigan."
"I am not wearing a cardigan."
"Step one is under negotiation."
Junction One is trying to kill me with kindness.
The docking level alone contains forty-seven distinct heartbeats within my sensory range.
Eleven species. A Corsairian with a metabolic signature that registers as a small fire.
A pair of Velaxians whose pheromone output is flooding the ventilation system with something that smells like burnt sugar and regret.
Somewhere above, someone is cooking meat in a way that would be classified as a chemical weapon under three separate treaties.
My dermal receptors are running hot. Every thermal signature in the crowd registers—a cascade of heat maps overlapping, shifting, bodies pressing too close in corridors designed for species half my size.
The Dens trained me to process sensory overload in combat conditions.
Combat conditions are quiet compared to a civilian space station at midday.
Combat conditions do not involve someone's child running past my legs and screaming about a lost toy and the pitch of the scream hitting a frequency that makes my ear canals ache.
I run the crowd anyway. Old training, new purpose: somewhere on this station is an acquisition team that docked before we did, and every face I clear is one less place for it to stand.
I am seven feet of crimson predator in a market district.
I am not subtle. People see me and give way—the instinctive retreat of prey species recognising something that could eat them, the wide berth that has followed me through every civilian space I have ever entered. I have never minded it before.
I mind it now. I mind it because she does not give way.
She walks beside me—small, warm, her shoulder level with my hip—and when the crowd parts around me she fills the space they leave, pressing close, her arm brushing mine.
She is not afraid of the thing that makes the crowd flinch.
She has never been afraid of it. And the people who know her see her walking with the thing the crowd flinches from and they recalibrate.
Her scent cuts through the overload. Peppermint.
Floral. Underneath, something biological—mine now, my pheromones layered into her skin chemistry.
The bonding has rewritten her scent signature.
She smells like herself and like me and the combination is a navigational beacon in the chaos.
My body orients toward her through the crowd the way it orients toward oxygen.
The layering is hours-old and unmistakable and every chemoreceptive species on this level can read it.
There was time to shower before we docked.
She chose not to. I am attempting not to translate what that choice does to my hindbrain while surrounded by civilians, and the attempt is failing at a rate Sprout could graph.
A vendor shouts her name—"Flossie! You're late, where's my routing update?
"—and she waves without slowing. A tea seller holds out a sample.
She takes it one-handed, sips, nods, keeps walking.
A dock worker asks after Morrison and she gives him Morrison's regards plus a piece of information about schedule changes that makes his face light up.
She moves through Junction One like she is part of its circulatory system, and I move behind her like an asteroid caught in a planet's gravity.
A male courier. Human. Tall, dark-haired, easy smile. Touches her arm.
My tail wraps her waist.
The motion is complete before my brain processes the command, which is because my brain did not issue the command.
Three and a half feet of prehensile muscle closing around her midsection and pulling her against my hip in a public corridor because a male with baseline vitals and an inoffensive handshake touched her forearm.
My tail has an independent foreign policy, and it is currently conducting a territorial campaign without authorization.
"Davin, this is Xor. Xor, Davin." She has not removed my tail. She is conducting introductions as though there is not a visible, prehensile claim wrapped around her body. "He's a friend."
Davin—the friend—looks at the tail. Looks at me. Seven feet. Horns. Gold eyes that are communicating something my diplomatic training does not have a classification for. Davin looks at Flossie.
"New development?"
"Recent. Ongoing." She pats my tail the way she pats Gerald the ceramic figurine. Affectionate. Unimpressed. "I'll explain over tea sometime."
Davin retreats—wisely—with a smile that suggests he understands the situation better than I do.
"Jealous?" She is grinning. The grin of a woman who is enjoying this.
"Xarthians do not experience jealousy. Jealousy implies insecurity regarding one's position. I am not insecure."
"Your tail is literally pulling me away from Davin."
"My tail is concerned about proximity safety in a crowded environment. This is a standard precautionary measure."
"Mm-hm." She does not remove it. She shifts closer.
Leans into the grip. Her hip against mine, her warmth bleeding through the cardigan, the tail tightening because she let it tighten and the letting is worse than the touching because the letting means she wants it and the wanting is mutual and we are in a public corridor and my cock is responding to the proximity with the subtlety of a male who has not been in public with a bonded mate before and has discovered that public proximity is a different category of torture.
The market roars and she rises on her toes to be heard over it, one hand flat on my chest, her mouth at the underside of my jaw.
"Stop growling, lovey. You'll frighten the locals.
" Her lips graze the fuzz. My claws cycle once.
She steps back with the smile of a woman conducting an experiment whose results she already owns.
Sprout's orb descends from above. Not to Flossie's shoulder.
To mine.
The positioning shift is deliberate. I feel the warmth of the orb's light near my collarbone where it usually hovers near hers. The AI that spent days threatening and monitoring and classifying me as hostile has moved.
"Davin is not a threat," Sprout says. Quiet. For me. "His heart rate is baseline. He has a partner on Level 3. They have been together for four years. I monitor everyone. This is not new information for anyone except you."
"I did not ask."
"You were about to extend your claws. In a market district. Around civilians. Context seemed prudent." The orb bobs once. "I have also taken the liberty of mapping a route to Morrison's office that avoids the three vendors most likely to hug Flossie. You are welcome."
"Why are you telling me things?"
The orb glows warm amber. The colour of an AI that has made a decision it will not explain.
"Because she won't," Sprout says. "And you'll panic."
Flossie glances at the orb at my shoulder. At the space where it used to hover at hers. Her eyes soften—the bright, fierce warmth of a woman watching her family rearrange itself around a new shape.
"Since when are you two on the same side?" she asks.
"Since his tactical assessments became marginally more consistent than yours," Sprout says.
"SPROUT."
"I said what I said."
The orb dims, briefly, to something more operational. "Also: two observers logged on the dock since we cleared the umbilical. Professional posture, civilian clothing, no approach. I am watching them watch us. Continue being enormous and distracting."
I continue being enormous. The distracting is involuntary.