Epilogue If It’s Missing
Epilogue: If It's Missing
Flossie
Three weeks later, the sign goes up.
SNAG RECOVERY SERVICES. Hand-painted. Slightly crooked.
Xor offered to install it precisely. I overruled him because precision is not the point — the point is that it was painted by a woman who names her weapons and a male who still calls fairy lights a navigational hazard and the crooked part is ours.
Unit 7, Finder’s Market, Level 2. Morrison’s floor plan, realized.
Two offices — his with sight lines to the door and mine with a tea station that could supply a small army.
A client intake area with the comfortable chairs Sprout requisitioned (“reinforced, as recommended”) and the fairy lights I strung across the ceiling while Xor stood behind me holding the ladder and radiating disapproval and arousal in equal measure.
The arousal has not diminished. Three weeks of sharing a berth and an office and a life, and his body still responds to mine like a navigational system locking onto a beacon.
I know because I can feel it — his heartbeat in my sternum, the permanent biological link that quickens when I walk into a room and steadies when I sit beside him.
His pulse when he sees me in the morning with sleep-mussed hair and his shirt and nothing else.
His pulse when I lean over the desk to reach a data pad and the claiming mark at my throat catches the light.
This morning it caught the light while I was briefing him on the Brax diagnostic windows, and he crossed both offices without one word, put his mouth over the mark until my knees forgot their assignment, and went back to his desk. “Continue,” he said. I did not continue for some time.
The mark. Visible. Always visible. I wear open collars now — not because he asked, because he would never ask, because the arrogant possessive alien who cataloged my scent at three feet and wrapped his tail around my waist in a public corridor has never once suggested I should display his mark.
I display it because I want to. Because the scar is mine.
Because Junction One knows Flossie Knight has been claimed by a Xarthian and the knowing does not diminish me. The knowing is power.
He is in his office. I can hear him — the low voice on a comm channel, the clipped precision of a male who runs tactical assessments the way other people breathe.
He has been coordinating with Morrison’s intelligence feeds, cross-referencing my notebook entries with operational data, building the case files that SNAG will use to find the things nobody else is looking for.
He is very good at this. The competence is, three weeks in, still doing things to me.
His tail taps the wall.
I hear it from my side — a soft, rhythmic thud against the shared partition.
Tap. Tap. Tap-tap. The sound of three and a half feet of prehensile muscle that wants to reach me and cannot because there is a wall in the way and the wall is not cooperating.
The tail has its own agenda and the agenda is my ankle and the wall is an obstacle the tail has not accepted.
He doesn’t know he’s doing it. Or he does know and won’t admit it.
Either way, the tapping has become a morning ritual — I sit at my desk, he sits at his, and within five minutes the tail starts knocking on the shared wall like a cat pawing at a closed door.
The most lethal operative in the sector and his tail is tapping on a wall because it misses me. We are ten feet apart.
There is a perfectly serviceable connecting doorway three meters to the tail’s left. The tail does not accept detours. The tail holds a position of principle on the matter of walls.
I press my palm flat to the wall. My side. Where the tapping is.
The tapping stops. A pause — two seconds, three. Then a slower tap. Once. The prehensile tip pressing flat against his side of the wall directly behind my palm. I can almost feel the warmth through the partition. Almost.
“That wall,” I tell nobody in particular, “is going to have to come down.”
“I have architectural recommendations prepared,” Sprout says.
“The structural modification would improve inter-office communication flow. Also: the wall is suffering. I have logged fourteen incidents of tail-related impact in three weeks. The plasterboard has feelings, Flossie. Somebody should advocate for the plasterboard.”
I take my hand off the wall. The tapping resumes immediately. Tap-tap. Tap. Needy. Rhythmic. The Tier 1 operative’s involuntary confession that ten feet of wall between us is ten feet too many.
I am in so much trouble with this man.
“Your heart rate has elevated,” Sprout announces from the ceiling. “Shall I inform Xor that his tactical approach is successful, or shall I allow you to maintain the fiction that you are unaffected?”
“Neither. Process the Morrison intelligence packet.”
“Processing. I note that the intelligence packet has been ready for eleven minutes and you have been listening to the tapping for nine of them. I am logging this under ‘operational efficiency: compromised by pair-bonding.’”
“Log whatever you want, Sprout.”
“I always do. For posterity.”
The tapping continues. Soft. Patient. The tail’s morning petition.
I press my palm to the wall again and his heartbeat steadies in my sternum — the calm that comes when he feels me reaching back, even through plasterboard.
The touching is limited by architecture and the limitation is the opposite of what either of us wants and the wanting is the opposite of lonely and I will never get used to it and I don’t want to.
The comm chirps at 1042.
I straighten in my chair. Smooth my collar — the open one, the claiming mark visible. The channel ID is one I know by heart now: the first number in SNAG’s client register. Case 001. Three weeks of pulling at a thread that someone went to considerable trouble to bury.
“SNAG Recovery Services. Good morning, lovey.”
“Ms Knight.” The client. Human. The tremble in her voice is worse this week — the particular tremble of a woman holding herself together with the fraying edges of hope, and the fraying is further along than it was on Monday. “I’m sorry to call again. You said to call. You said — any change.”
“I did, and I meant it. Tell me.”
“It’s quieter.” A breath. The kind that costs.
“The bond. His heartbeat. Even after he vanished it was there — faint, like a comm signal from too far out. Now there are hours where I have to go still and hunt for it. I lose whole afternoons hunting for it.” A pause.
“The doctors adjusted my medication. It isn’t the medication, Ms Knight.
Torek is getting further away. Or fainter. Is there a difference?”
My hand goes to my sternum.
His heartbeat. There. Steady. Ten feet away behind a plasterboard wall, and I would know it at any distance, and I know exactly what this woman is describing because I am listening to the opposite of it.
“There’s a difference,” I say. Warm. Steady. The voice Morrison trained. “Fainter is not gone. And further away is a direction — and directions can be followed. We have a new lead, and a new tracker starting this week. The best in the sector.”
“You’ll tell me. Even if it’s bad. You’re the only one who ever wrote him down — nine months I carried this and yours is the only record that says he existed.”
“I wrote him down then and I’m writing him down now, and every entry ends the same way, lovey: open. The case is open. He is not a closed file while I’m breathing.”
The sound she makes is not a word. It is the sound of a person being heard.
Through the shared wall, I feel his heartbeat change. Xor heard — Xarthian hearing, the word quieter, the word fainter. I hear him stand. Three strides and he is behind my chair, tail around my ankle with the real grip. Not the playful tapping. The one that says I am here and I am not going silent.
I take the update. The bond-signal changes, the timing, the doctors’ notes she reads me in a voice that shakes.
I write everything in the notebook — the brown cover, the worn pages, the entries stacking up beneath SNAG case 001 — and under the newest one I write the thing the notebook is for: still there. Follow the faint.
The call ends. I sit with the notebook open and the entry staring back at me.
He comes around my chair and crouches to eye level. Gold eyes. The expression that used to be clinical and is now something rawer — the face of a male who has just heard a woman describe his worst fear getting worse.
“Fainter,” he says. The word costs him.
“Fainter is not gone.”
“No. And it is a direction.” The operative and the male, both present. “He was taken — we have known that for three weeks. What we have not had is someone who can follow a cold trail through space nobody charts. The trail is going quiet, Flossie. The window is closing.”
“I know. And we need help.” I pull up the contact Morrison suggested. “We need a tracker.”
“Ex-SRS Tier 2 tracker. Freelance.” The specific flat voice. The brain retrieving a file it did not want to open. “Name.”
“Vosk. Tael Vosk.”
The tail on my ankle goes rigid.
“No.”
“You know him.”
“I know him. We overlapped at SRS for three years. He is arrogant, insubordinate, and has the operational discipline of a feral cat.”
“So you’re saying he’ll fit right in.”
“I am saying he was the only tracker who could locate a target before I could reach it, and the experience was professionally humiliating, and I am not inviting that experience into our office.”
“Lovey, the wife is dying. The bond is going silent. We need the best tracker in the sector and you just told me he’s the best tracker in the sector.”
Xor’s jaw works. The fangs pressing. Not the claiming ache — the grinding frustration of a male who is correct and does not want to be correct and knows his mate is also correct and the double correctness is intolerable.
“Fine. Contact him. But I am conducting the intake interview.”
“We’re conducting it together. This is a partnership.”