14. The Reckoning #2
"The first day you didn't know how to let someone fix things for you.
" Her thumb moves. One slow stroke along the ridge of muscle, following the geometric marking toward my collar.
The sensation tracks fire across my skin.
My hand finds her hip — not a grab, a placement, my palm against the curve of her through the shirt, and she does not step away.
She shifts into the touch. A inch closer.
Her belly against my shoulder again. The heat of her through the thin fabric.
"You're learning," she says. Her thumb traces the marking another inch and my mouth falls open on an exhale that is not dignified and her lips curve and she steps back. Deliberate. The distance arriving like a door closing, and the absence of her warmth against my shoulder is physical loss.
"Reckoning first," she says. "Then Junction One. Then —"
"And then."
"And then." She sits back down. Crosses her legs. Her cheeks are flushed and her pulse is racing, and she is performing composure with the discipline of a woman who knows that if she touches me for one more second, the corridor and the pursuit craft and the villain on the comms will have to wait.
I conduct the assessment. Because that is what I do, even now — even with the ghost of her thumb on my shoulder and the taste of her on my tongue and the biological impossibility of objectivity. I assess.
I pull up Saar's deployment file on the secondary display.
Standard Tier 1 operational package — mission brief, tactical parameters, extraction protocol.
Agent Saar. Recruited two years after me.
We sparred in the Tier 1 facility. Saar was fast. Precise.
Good enough that I recommended the promotion.
Trell sent Saar to kill me — Trell, or whoever has learned to wear his codes, a distinction I cannot yet prove. Or to kill her and bring me back, which amounts to the same thing with different paperwork.
The file includes the standard recall notice.
It is addressed to me by operational designation — not name, never name, Trell does not learn names until Tier 2 and even then uses them sparingly.
The language is clinical. Agent Xax: Non-compliance confirmed.
Report to Station Kosk for debrief and reassignment.
Failure to report will result in asset termination protocol.
Asset termination. Not personnel. Not agent. Asset. The same language the kill order used for Flossie — non-recoverable asset. We are both line items now. Both inventory that has been written off.
"What are you reading?" She has noticed the stillness. She always notices.
"My recall notice." I turn the display so she can see it.
No concealment. The promise. "Trell has classified me as non-compliant.
The standard consequence is reassignment to a remote station, psychological reconditioning, and operational downgrade.
The non-standard consequence — for a Tier 1 who has been compromised — is termination. "
"They'd kill you."
"They would decommission me. The language distinction matters to SRS. It matters less to the person being decommissioned." I close the file. "I am not going back."
"I know."
"I need you to understand what that means.
" I turn the chair to face her. The corridor runs on autopilot — the mineral walls stable, the passage widening toward the exit.
Her face in the amber light. The swollen lip.
The brown eyes that see everything and file it and never forget.
"SRS is the only structure I have had since I was sixteen years old.
Before SRS, there were the Proving Dens.
Before the Dens, there was — nothing. A family I cannot remember clearly enough to grieve.
SRS recruited me, trained me, gave me rank and purpose and a function.
They told me I was the best and the being-the-best was the only form of belonging I had left. "
She is listening. Not interrupting. Not offering comfort. Listening the way she does — body turned toward me, eyes steady, hands still. The way she listens at case intakes that I have not seen but can imagine. Tell me what you lost, lovey.
"The pay is significant. Tier 1 compensation is designed to create dependency — the golden handcuffs, my colleagues call it, though most of them do not recognise the metaphor because they have never tried to take them off.
The quarters are comfortable. The equipment is the best in the sector.
Every friend I have — had — every social connection, every point of contact with another living being, runs through SRS infrastructure.
Walk away from SRS and you walk away from everyone who has ever known your name. "
"Trell," she says. Not a question.
"Trell called me promising asset when I was sixteen and it was the closest thing to a father's approval I had received in years.
He told me I was his. Not his agent. His.
" I hear the word and the resonance has changed.
When I boarded the ship it would have been neutral — the possessive of a commanding officer.
Now it sits in the cockpit next to the memory of her hand on my face and her voice saying you're ours now through an AI that had been hostile to me from the moment I stepped aboard.
And the difference between his and ours is the entire distance between what I was and what I am becoming.
"I am giving up the only family I have known for thirty years."
I say it. Flat. Let the words exist.
"And it is not close."
She blinks. "What?"
"The calculation. The operational assessment of what I am losing against what I have —" I stop.
My jaw works. The processing failure approaching — I can feel it, the vocabulary failing, the clinical language crumbling under the weight of something that does not fit in any briefing.
"What I have gained. The maths should be close.
Against a handful of days on a cargo ship with a woman who names her weapons and writes down lost things and kissed me in a corridor while my blood was on her hands. "
"And?"
"It is not close." The words arrive from the place beneath the framework, the place where the purr lives. "You win by a margin that embarrasses me."
She does not cry. She does not reach for me. She does not perform the emotional response that the moment seems to demand. She sits in the pilot's chair with her hands in her lap and her lips pressed together and her eyes very bright and she nods once.
"Good," she says. The word has weight. The weight of a woman who has been flying alone for ten years and has just been told that the distance between her and loneliness is not close and the male saying it means every syllable. "Good."
Her hand crosses the console. Finds mine. Fingers lacing through — small and callused, the blaster-worn tips fitting between my broad knuckles. She squeezes. I squeeze back. The crescent marks in my palms press against her skin and she does not flinch from the scars.
The purr runs steady. Low. The bonding frequency filling the cockpit alongside the mineral light and the want and the smell of both of us.
I turn back to the tactical display. She turns back to the corridor. We fly hand in hand and neither of us mentions it and the not-mentioning is the loudest thing in the ship.
Her pulse is in her fingertips.
I can feel it against my palm—the living fact of it, faint and regular, the biological confirmation that she is here and warm and real and five feet tall and in possession of my entire operating system.
I have held hands with no one in thirty years. SRS does not train for this. There is no operational category for the specific quality of a hand in yours when you have given up everything for the person attached to it and have no regrets about the arithmetic.
Five hours and fifty-one minutes remain on the corridor counter. I am aware of every second.
We exit the corridor at marker nine. The mineral walls open like a jaw and the Petal slides into open space — black, star-scattered, the Reach spreading ahead with Junction One a long transit through charted territory.
The relief lasts eleven seconds.
"Incoming transmission," Sprout announces. The orb is cycling gold — not battle white, not amber. A colour I have not seen before. Cautious. "Not SRS. Not military. Independent frequency. Encrypted, but the encryption is —" a pause, "theatrical. It wants to be noticed."
"Source?"
"The encryption signature matches the Drask Acquisitions methodology from the spoofed kill order.
" Another cycle. "He is hailing directly.
He knows we are alive. He knows we exited the corridor.
" The orb cycles once. "He began transmitting ninety seconds after we cleared the exit marker. He was waiting for us."
Flossie's hand tightens in mine. One squeeze. Not fear — readiness. Then she lets go, and both hands find the flight controls, and she is the pilot again.
My tail, which has been learning new forms of insubordination with every passing hour, slides from the armrest to her thigh.
Not the tentative brush from the corridor.
The full weight, settling against her leg with possessive certainty, and she does not push it away.
Her hand drops from the controls for one second — finds the tail, squeezes once, firm, the last twelve inches, and the sensation jolts through me hard enough that I grip the armrest. Her lips twitch.
Then both hands return to the controls and her face goes professional.
"Put him through."
The cockpit display flickers. Not a face — Drask does not provide visual. An audio waveform, elegant and precise, the kind of signal processing that costs more than most ships.