2. Reading the Air #2
“And there’s something else.” I crouch at the edge of the loading platform where the crimson pools deepest. Underneath the Xarthian signature, woven through it like a stain through fabric: something pale.
Synthetic. “A chemical overlay. Not biological. I can’t identify it at this level of decay, I’d need a fresher sample or lab analysis, but it shouldn’t be here.
Xarthian scent doesn’t carry synthetic overlays unless someone introduced one. ”
“Introduced how?”
“Administered. To him. Before or during the extraction.” I stand.
The tracker is finished. The male is still hard and trying very hard not to think about the fact that she is close enough that if she took one step left, her hip would brush the place where my body is refusing to calm down.
“Someone dosed a Xarthian male with an unidentified synthetic in this bay and then put him on a ship that isn’t registered to anyone real. That’s not opportunistic.”
“It’s targeted.”
“And whoever did it has access to xenobiological pharmacology, or hired someone who does. This was planned by people who study their targets before they move.”
Torres goes still. Completely still, the way prey goes still except she’s the opposite of prey, she’s a female whose hands have stopped moving and whose chin has lifted and whose entire body is radiating the controlled fury that does something to my circulatory system I’m not prepared to examine.
The fury lives in the line of her throat, the white of her knuckles, the way her shoulders have locked.
It makes her look dangerous and beautiful, as if she could take whatever she wanted if she ever stopped being careful.
She’s looking at the exact spot where the crimson pools, and her expression is the one I’ve seen on soldiers standing over ground they were supposed to protect.
“While you were reading the air,” she says, and her voice is level the way a blade is level, “I was reading the bay.”
She walks me to the loading dock clamps.
Tool marks. Someone manually overrode the docking mechanism, bypassed the automated log so the system never recorded the maintenance ship’s arrival.
Clean work. The override you don’t learn from a manual; you learn it from doing it, or from someone who’s done it.
“That’s not opportunistic,” I say. “That’s tradecraft.”
“Yes.”
She straightens. Moves to the cameras. Pulls up the calibration log on her scanner and turns the screen so I can see it.
“The standard diagnostic cycle is twenty minutes. That’s the gap I’ve been requesting equipment to close.”
“I know.”
“On the night Torek vanished, the cycle wasn’t twenty minutes.”
The cold in the bay gets colder. Not temperature. The internal drop when a case stops being theoretical and starts being something worse.
“How long.”
“Twenty-six.”
Six extra minutes. Long enough for the maintenance ship to finish its work and clear the bay before the cameras came back online. Not a vulnerability exploit. A modification. Someone reached inside her system and gave them those six minutes.
“You’re telling me someone hacked your security infrastructure.”
“I’m telling you someone with maintenance-level access modified a diagnostic parameter I’ve been monitoring since I took this post.” Her hands tighten on the scanner.
Knuckles pale. Her scar catches the light, and for half a second, she looks exactly like what she is: a female who’s been punching systems her entire career, and the systems keep getting back up.
“The modification was designed to look like a routine calibration update. I didn’t catch it because it was built to pass my own review criteria.
They used my system against the people it was supposed to protect. ”
The bay goes quiet. Not the ambient hum; the silence between two people who’ve arrived at the same ugly conclusion from different directions.
I found the what: Xarthian male, stationary, dosed with something synthetic, extracted by ship. She found the how: engineered camera gap, bypassed docking log, inside access. We don’t reach the full picture alone.
This is a problem. Not the case; the case is a problem I understand.
The other problem is that Natalie Torres is standing in a docking bay with tool marks and a hacked camera system, and she’s not breaking.
She’s furious, the compressed I-told-you-this-would-happen fury of a female who warned everyone and nobody listened, and it makes her look like she could dismantle this bay with her bare hands, and I want to watch her do it.
I want to hand her the wrench. I want to put my mouth on the pulse under her jaw while she does it and see if she makes a sound when the fury finally has somewhere to go.
The instinct to say something lands before I can stop it. Something about how it’s not her fault, about how institutions eat their own, about how I know—
She’s already moving. Scanner up. Back to the evidence. The shutters coming down behind her eyes so fast I can almost hear them, and I recognize the move because I’ve used it. Deflect. Redirect. Don’t let anyone see the structural damage.
My claws are still out. Extended for tracking, grip and precision, the tools doing what tools do.
But the tracking is done. I’m standing two feet from a woman whose body is held rigid with fury, whose hands are white-knuckled on a scanner, who is vibrating at a frequency my senses read as distress and my biology is responding to with a clarity that has nothing to do with the case and everything to do with the two feet of cold air between us I am not closing.
I let her redirect. This time.
My claws retract.
Not because I decide to retract them. They slide back into my fingers as if my hands got a memo my brain didn’t send.
Draelith biology. The body deciding, on its own, without consultation or consent, that the female standing next to me is safe.
Not-threat. Not-enemy. Something the claws don’t come out for.
Something the rest of me is already half-hard and aching for.
My hands go soft.
She doesn’t see it. She’s looking at her scanner, at the evidence of someone turning her life’s work into a corridor for kidnapping, and she doesn’t know that the male standing next to her just lost a fight with his own biology because her pain short-circuited something he didn’t know could be short-circuited.
She doesn’t know that the same biology is currently mapping the exact temperature of the air between her body and mine and calculating how little it would take to close it.
“JINX.”
“Yes?”
“Don’t log that.”
“Log what? I have no idea what you’re referring to. I have, however, logged your request not to log something, which is itself a log entry. This is the paradox of surveillance. You’re welcome.”
She’s at the loading dock clamps. Reviewing the tool marks.
Standing close because the marks are small and she needs to be near the surface to read them properly.
Near the surface and near me, because I haven’t moved, because the smart thing would be to take two steps back and let the investigation breathe, and instead I’m standing here like my boots have fused to the deck plating.
The heat of her is a constant pressure against my left side.
I can smell the soap. I can smell the warmer places under the uniform that the cold air hasn’t reached yet.
The ventilation pushes air that’s been recycled through cargo infrastructure and stripped of anything approaching warmth. I run five degrees above human standard. In this bay, I’m the warmest thing in the room.