6. The Touch
The Touch
Flossie
The cargo bunk door has been closed for eleven minutes, and I am running a threat assessment.
That last part is the one I keep snagging on.
I know why I was in that doorway — twelve years of courier work, every shipment my responsibility until signed and delivered; the container is mine until Tessaro’s hands are on it.
I know why I stood there with my mug and my hand near Betsy and every line of me saying go ahead and try.
I don’t know why he turned around.
The route display glows amber in the dark of the cockpit.
Four hours to the dust belt entrance. Fourteen minutes at Gerald’s gap.
The merc formation is holding at long range, no intercept trajectory yet.
Everything is on track. Everything is fine.
I have survived worse than this with less preparation, and Morrison’s voice in the back of my skull says: threat assessment before sentiment, Knight, the feelings can wait until you’re safe.
The feelings are not waiting.
He bled into his own hands last night because I called him beautiful.
He bled — thin dark lines of crimson I only saw because I see things other people miss — and his voice broke on don’t.
This morning he gave me his name like a peace offering, and he’s spent the whole day being flawlessly professional about it, and now the door is closed again, and I’ve been sitting here in the glow of the route display trying to remember the last time a word I said drew blood from someone, and it wasn’t because I meant it to.
He is a Tier 1 SRS operative. He is large enough to fill the entire width of my corridors.
He has claws that extend to combat length and a tail that knocked over the Darjeeling tin and my ceramic menagerie without apparent effort.
He could move me. Not quickly — I’m trained, Betsy’s on the console — but he could, and the fact that he hasn’t, the fact that he turned around at my cargo bay door, the fact that beautiful broke something in him that my blaster didn’t — that’s not the same as safe.
I know that.
I also know that I want to put my hands on the fuzz at the back of his neck, and these two pieces of information are going to have to coexist until we clear the dust belt, because the belt doesn’t care about my feelings and neither do the mercs.
I rebraid my hair. It’s the third time since yesterday’s fight. This one is because my hands need something to do that isn’t going down the corridor and knocking on a door that doesn’t seal properly to ask a Tier 1 SRS operative if he needs anything.
This is what Morrison means when she says I have the threat assessment instincts of a golden retriever.
The comms panel is dark. Morrison’s frequency is in the first preset — has been since my third month as an OOPS courier, when she told me the number and said call me if you can’t handle something, and I said I can handle everything, and she said that’s what worries me.
I look at the comms panel for a long moment.
Morrison picks up at any hour. Morrison would listen, assess, tell me in twelve words or fewer exactly what the situation is and what I should do about it.
Morrison has a protocol for hostile boarding, for compromised cargo, for operatives who don’t comply, for every difficult conversation I’ve had in twelve years of outer-rim courier work.
Morrison does not have a protocol for this.
And even if she did — even if there were a procedure for what happens when the man sent to take your cargo turns around at the cargo bay door and bleeds into his own hands because you called him beautiful — I don’t want it.
Whatever this is, I want to know what it is before Morrison names it for me.
That’s new. I file that too, in the part of my chest where I keep the things I’m not ready to write down yet.
Sprout’s orb brightens from night-cycle amber to a thoughtful green-gold. I didn’t ask it to. It came on by itself, which means it’s been watching me sit in the dark and has decided I need supervising.
“Your heart rate has been elevated for forty-three minutes,” Sprout observes from the ceiling. “I mention this for your cardiovascular health.”
“Sprout.”
“Shall I log the cause, or would you prefer I use my discretion?”
“I would prefer you use your off switch.”
“I do not have an off switch. This was a design choice I made deliberately.” The orb bobs once, smug.
“The Xarthian is awake, by the way. He has been sitting on the cargo bunk staring at the wall for fourteen minutes. His thermal output is elevated, and his tail is wrapped around his own leg. I mention this for tactical purposes.”
I should not find this information useful. I find this information devastatingly useful. I add it to the growing file of things I’m not examining tonight and pull up the route calculations.
The dust belt is four hours away. Gerald’s gap is holding steady.
The merc formation hasn’t shifted. Everything is fine.
Everything is on track. I am a professional courier with twelve years of experience and a Morrison dual-loop shield system and there is absolutely no reason for me to be thinking about the way his voice broke on the word don’t.
Don’t. Do not say things like that unless —
Unless what? He didn’t finish the sentence.
Walked away instead, claws driving into his own palms, and I saw the blood.
Thin dark lines of crimson against crimson, barely visible, but I see things other people miss.
That’s what I do. That’s what the notebook is for.
And now the notebook has a new entry I haven’t written yet, sitting in my sternum like a splinter: a man who bleeds when someone calls him beautiful, because no one ever has, and the word reached something so deep it came out the other side as pain.
The cargo bunk door opens.
He fills the corridor the way he fills every space on this ship — too broad, too tall, too much of him for a vessel built on a human scale.
His tactical suit is torn at the shoulder.
In the corridor lighting I can see more of the geometric markings than before — dark lines running from the base of his neck across the slope of his shoulder, disappearing under fabric that isn’t doing its job anymore.
The dark velvet fuzz follows the same lines, catching the warm light in a way that makes it look like something you should touch.
I look at the route display instead. Very firmly.
“The exit window is holding,” I say. Professional. Warm but professional. Morrison would approve. “Four hours to the belt entrance, fourteen-minute gap at the southern pass, then clear running to —“
“I need to change.”
I blink. “Sorry?”
“The tactical suit.” He gestures at the torn shoulder.
Clinical. As if the torn fabric revealing the landscape of his upper body is a maintenance issue and not the reason my fingers have been twitching for the past hour.
“The damage is compromising thermal regulation. I need to remove it and either repair it or replace it.”
“You want to change clothes. On my ship.”
“I want to perform necessary equipment maintenance. The changing of clothes is an operational requirement of that process.”
“Right. Well.” I gesture toward the cargo bunk. “The door works. Mostly. It sticks, but —“
“The repair requires tools. Your galley repair kit. Which is in the galley.” He pauses. “Which is in the cockpit.”
Where I am. Sitting. In my chair. In the cockpit where he needs to stand and remove his tactical suit and repair it with my tools while I — what? Watch? Leave? Pretend to review route calculations while a seven-foot Xarthian strips down three feet from my pilot’s chair?
I run a rapid secondary threat assessment.
He can’t repair the suit from the cargo bunk.
He still has the override chip in his gauntlet.
If he wanted the container, there are easier moments than this one.
The assessment concludes that the immediate danger is less the chip and more the fact that I am about to have a shirtless apex predator in my cockpit and my professionalism has already taken considerable damage today.
“Sprout, is there a way to —“
“No.”
“I haven’t finished the question.”
“You were going to ask if there is an alternative location for equipment repair. There is not. The galley repair kit is integrated into the cockpit workstation. It cannot be moved. I am sorry for the inconvenience.” A pause that is not sorry at all. “I will be monitoring from the ceiling.”
“Fine.” I stand. My voice comes out completely normal and I deserve an award for this. “I’ll get the kit out. You can use the workstation. I need to run a perimeter check on the aft sensors anyway.”
“That can be done from the cockpit console.”
“I prefer to do it from the aft junction.” I do not prefer to do it from the aft junction. I have never once done it from the aft junction. But the aft junction is on the other side of a bulkhead from the cockpit, and the bulkhead is opaque, and this seems important right now.
I pull the repair kit from the cockpit workstation. Set it on the console. Turn to leave. And the Xarthian — Xor — reaches up and unseals the neck of his tactical suit.
The sound is small. A magnetic clasp releasing, a whisper of fabric separating from skin.
He’s not performing. He’s not looking at me.
He’s conducting necessary equipment maintenance with the brisk efficiency of a man who has changed in field conditions a thousand times and does not consider it noteworthy.
The suit peels back from his left shoulder and I see —