Epilogue If It’s Missing #4
We close the office at 1900. It has been the longest, most chaotic, most productive first day of any company in the history of Junction One, and I am exhausted in the way that feels like abundance rather than depletion.
Tael is gone — not into the sector, not yet.
He has a meeting with Torres at 0900 and he’s going to need a berth on Junction One for the foreseeable future.
“Any recommendations for accommodations that aren’t terrible?
” he asked on his way out. Before I could answer, Petra said, “Is there anything near the office?” — and the speed of that question told me everything I needed to know about how badly she wants this to be real.
I gave them both berth assignments on Level 3.
Close to the office. Close to each other. Close to me.
Tael asked one more question before he left, casual, not looking at me: “Torres. She always like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like —“ He stopped. Didn’t finish. Left. His tail was wound around his own leg the way I’ve seen Xor’s do when he’s holding something back. Tight. Controlled. Deliberate.
I wrote a question mark in the notebook.
Petra has, in four and a half hours, reorganized the supply closet (without picking the lock — she used the key, which I count as growth), memorized the locations of all sixty-two tea varieties, befriended Sprout in a way that concerns me, and claimed the smallest desk in the intake area as her own.
Maurice sits on the desk next to a data pad and the lock-picking kit, which she has agreed not to deploy without authorization but which she keeps within reach the way I keep the notebook.
She hasn’t said the word home. She doesn’t have to. I know the look — the look of someone testing weight on a floor they’re not sure will hold.
I’ll make sure it holds.
One more thing about the desk. Late afternoon, I leaned across it for a data pad and his heartbeat spiked in my sternum hard enough to read as an alarm.
I looked up. Doorway. Gold eyes. Tactical stillness.
“Not yet, lovey,” I said. “Clients first.” His tail flicked once — noted, filed, pending — and pending is a category this office is going to have to reckon with very soon.
Tomorrow’s schedule, before Sprout dims the lights: Vosk with Torres at 0900.
The Torek data review after. And at 1400 — the interview.
Lorri. Human, young, a voice like warm honey over something treading water.
She commed about a different matter entirely and I heard the underneath of her and asked her to come in before we’d finished talking.
The first time SNAG has reached out to a person instead of a person reaching out to SNAG.
She says she’s never done recovery work. I have a feeling about her.
“You are collecting people now,” Xor says from his doorway.
“I’m recruiting.”
“You are collecting.”
“I hope it works out.” I mean it the way I mean the things I write down. Some meetings change everything. You never know which ones.
Xor locks the office. His tail finds my waist. The evening version — settled, certain, the wrap of a male walking home with the woman whose heartbeat lives in his chest.
“Vosk is competent,” he says. Like it costs him something.
“High praise.”
“It is not praise. It is an operational assessment.”
“And Petra?”
Quiet. We walk through the Finder’s Market, past the evening vendors and the shift-change traffic and the ordinary life of a station that doesn’t know a fairy-light-decorated recovery company is about to start pulling at threads nobody else will touch.
“She reorganized the supply closet by threat-level instead of alphabetically,” he says.
“High-risk items on the left, low-risk on the right. She created three sub-categories I had not considered.” His tail tightens on my waist. Not the territorial grip.
The impressed one. “Her system is marginally superior.”
“Are you telling me you like her?”
“I am telling you her organizational instincts are structurally sound.”
“Sprout, log the professional assessment.”
“Logged. Filed under ‘affection: pre-emptive denial.’ The file is growing.”
We walk through Junction One. His tail around my waist. The purr filling the corridor, low and steady, the bonding frequency that I feel in my teeth and my sternum and the claiming mark at my throat. Three weeks ago this was new. It is not new anymore. It is home.
His hand slides from my waist to my hip as we clear the market, and the purr changes registers — the after-hours frequency, the one with intentions. “Home,” he says, and the word has an agenda. The office stays innocent for now. The berth has never once made that promise.
The notebook is in my cardigan pocket. Torek.
One entry. One missing bonded Xarthian. One dying wife.
One case that might be ordinary and might be something else entirely.
A tracker in the field. A chaos agent asleep with lock-picks under her pillow.
A security chief who runs the tightest operation on the frontier and is going to find a Draelith with fourteen movement violations and a smirk in her office at 0900 tomorrow.
I don’t know what’s coming. I never do. But I write everything down, and the writing has never steered me wrong.
If something is missing — if someone is lost, if a gap in a system has swallowed a person whole and the institutions have stopped looking —
Call SNAG.
Ask for Flossie.
Tell her what you lost, lovey.
She writes everything down.
Flossie and Xor's story is complete. The sign is up. The kettle is on. And Case 001 is already open.
A bonded pair, separated. A wife the doctors can't save. Three agencies closing the same file in the same words — word for word.
Somebody made those people disappear. SNAG Recovery Services is going to find out who.