3. Seventeen Names
Seventeen Names
Natalie
The SNAG office smells like chamomile and poor decisions.
Not mine. Theirs. The chamomile is coming from a tea station that occupies an entire corner of what should be operational workspace, sixty-two varieties arranged alphabetically and a kettle with a hand-painted label reading EMOTIONAL SUPPORT APPLIANCE.
The poor decisions are architectural: fairy lights across the ceiling, a figurine on a monitor, a stuffed bear on Petra Phan’s desk, and two reinforced chairs positioned at angles that suggest Flossie Knight expects her clients to be very large or very emotional and has planned for both.
I am here for a briefing about an inside job on my station, involving my security infrastructure, conducted in a room that has a betting pool pinned to the wall with actual pushpins.
The available seating includes a chair with a crocheted seat cover in burnt orange. I remain standing.
“Welcome to the war room, lovey.” Flossie’s behind her desk, notebook open, pen in hand, tea steaming at her elbow. She’s already writing. “Tea?”
“I don’t drink on duty.”
“It’s chamomile. It has no tactical implications.”
“Everything has tactical implications.”
“Oh, I know, pet. I was testing.” She doesn’t look up. “Sit when you’re ready. Or don’t. Xor doesn’t sit either, and he’s a seven-foot Xarthian, so there’s precedent.”
Xor stands behind Flossie’s chair. Seven feet of crimson, gold eyes flat with operational focus, tail around her waist in the casual proprietary wrap I understand is less about possession and more about contact.
He’s touching her because his body requires it.
She’s letting him because she chose to. It’s the thing I’d have dismissed as unprofessional the first time I walked in here and am now finding difficult to dismiss as anything other than two people who belong to each other.
Petra is sitting on her desk. Not in a chair. On. The desk. The stuffed bear in her lap, an expression that says she is paying attention to approximately forty percent of the proceedings and using the remaining sixty to clock everything in the room that isn’t nailed down.
And Tael is in the reinforced chair at the briefing table.
Three feet to my left. Legs extended. Tail in its spiral.
The sprawl that suggests, in every language I speak and several I don’t, that the furniture should feel flattered.
The warm-wood-and-spice isn’t as strong as it was in my office this morning; the SNAG ventilation carries chamomile and whatever Petra has been eating.
But it’s there. Underneath. Threading through the chamomile like a current under still water.
I focus on Flossie. Flossie is safe.
“Right.” Flossie flips to a fresh page. Her pen taps once. “Bay 7. Give it to me.”
“Xarthian male scent. Four months faded. Stationary at the loading dock, not ambulatory; he was already down when they brought him in.” Tael doesn’t embellish.
He reports. “There’s a synthetic overlay on his signature.
Pharmaceutical. I can’t identify it at four months’ decay, but it shouldn’t be there. ”
“Sedative?”
“Something from a lab. Not a supply closet.”
“Hm.” The pen moves. “Natalie.”
“Someone with maintenance-level credentials extended the camera diagnostic cycle from twenty minutes to twenty-six. The modification was logged as a routine calibration update, designed to pass my own review criteria.” My voice is flat.
It stays flat. “I wrote the schedule. The update wasn’t on it. ”
“They used your system against the people it was supposed to protect.”
“Yes.”
Flossie writes.
“Xor.” She doesn’t look up. “Pair-bond biology. Give me the ugly version.”
Xor’s tail shifts against her waist. A micro-adjustment. I register it because I am, apparently, cataloging tail movements now.
“A Xarthian does not leave a pair-bond voluntarily. The biology does not permit it.” Xor’s voice is flat, the way a blade is flat. “The bond is a continuous pheromone exchange between mates. If they are separated, the signal degrades. The body compensates. Until it can’t. Then it begins to fail.”
“Fail how?”
“The human mate dies first. Her nervous system loses its regulator and stops knowing what to do. The Xarthian male dies second, slower, because our biology is more stubborn about it.”
Petra, quietly: “That’s horrible.”
“Yes.”
“How long does she have?” I ask.
Gold eyes find mine. Xor does not soften the answer.
“Four months of bond-silence for an eleven-year pair puts the human mate in the last survivable window. If we recover him inside three weeks, she lives. Past four, we are recovering a body.”
“Four months,” I say. “Maren’s intake says four months. Your notebook is older than that.”
Flossie does not look up from the page. “Nine months, lovey. I wrote him down nine months ago, because somebody should have been looking for him then and nobody was.”
“Then the dates don’t agree.”
“The dates agree perfectly.” Xor’s gold eyes do not move off mine. “They are not measuring the same thing. Florence counted from the docking record. Maren counted from the silence. He went missing the better part of a year ago. His bond went quiet four months ago.”
The arithmetic assembles in my chest before I have finished wanting it to.
“Then somebody held him for five months before they put him under.”
“Yes.”
“Where.”
Flossie’s pen stops on the page. “That, lovey, is the line I have been staring at since I wrote it.”
The room quiets.
Flossie’s pen stops. She reaches up without looking, without needing to, and lays her hand over Xor’s where it rests on the back of her chair.
His tail goes still. Neither of them says anything.
The surrounding room has been rewritten by the claiming-mark and a shared wall and the way he stands behind her chair like the spot was engineered for him, and I understand, looking at them, that Xor did not give us the textbook answer.
He gave us the answer he has been memorizing since the day he marked her, in case he ever has to survive it.
I have never, in fifteen years, understood what that looks like from the outside.
It looks like this.
My chest does a complicated thing I catalog and file.
“Three weeks,” I say. Operational voice. “Understood.”
Xor’s thumb moves once across Flossie’s knuckles. It is the smallest gesture I have ever seen a seven-foot apex predator make, and I do not know what to do with the fact that it is almost unbearable to witness.
“SPROUT,” Flossie says. “File update.”
The amber orb at the ceiling brightens. “Filing Bay 7 findings under Case Torek, sub-category Methodology: Unidentified Synthetic. Premeditated. I have also cross-referenced the maintenance-level access list with station betting pool participation. I am not saying this is relevant. I am saying I have done it.”
“Sprout.”
“Logged, Flossie. Filed under Overstepping: Anticipated.”
Petra snorts. The sound is immediate and genuine and Petra-shaped, and she doesn’t apologize for it.
“Xor.” Flossie again. The briefing tempo. “Tactical read on inside-access extraction methodology?”
“Corporate procurement. The shell registration, the synthetic overlay, the system modification: none of it is opportunistic. The extraction team had a window, a delivery, and a destination. They had the Xarthian biological profile and they had the Junction One security schedule. That level of preparation requires operational intelligence SRS would call Tier Two minimum.” His golden eyes move across the room.
Not hostile. Assessing. “Who has maintenance-level access to your camera diagnostics?”
“Seventeen people.”
The room absorbs the number.
“Pull the list,” he says.
I pull up the datapad.
The list populates. Seventeen names. Station maintenance crew, long-serving, vetted.
Faces I recognize from four years of morning briefings and shift reports and the quiet, invisible work of keeping a station running.
Good people. People I trusted with access to infrastructure that protects three hundred and forty thousand civilians.
“Sixteen of them are wallpaper.” Tael hasn’t moved.
Legs extended, eyes on the display, the voice doing the working-register thing.
“I ran the elimination before you walked into the bay. Didn’t need three hours; I had every signature on that deck in my overlay by the time your boots stopped behind me.
Sixteen of those names left the pattern a shift leaves.
Shift, shift, shift. One left something else.
Trace at the camera array that doesn’t sit on any shift, and the same signature is on the loading clamps, right where the tool marks are. ”
“Which one.”
“I don’t have names, Torres. I have a nose. Give SPROUT the seventeen and the array timestamps and I’ll tell you which one is lying.”
“Running cross-reference,” SPROUT says. “Cross-referencing access timestamps against the Bay 7 diagnostic modification window and the Draelith’s trace location. Processing. Please hold while I attempt to keep my commentary to a minimum. Held. Processing.”
“How’s that going?” Petra asks.
“The commentary minimization? Poorly. Thank you for asking.”
Flossie makes a sound. It might be a cough.
It is not a cough. Her pen is moving again, and from my angle it’s moving too fast to be notes on the briefing.
It’s moving the way a pen moves when it’s recording a date and a question mark, and I decide, firmly, not to ask what the question is or who it’s about.
While SPROUT works, the room does something I don’t have a reference for: it waits. Xor doesn’t fidget. Flossie writes. Petra picks up her bear and puts it down and picks it up again. Tael, three feet to my left, which I know without looking, is quiet.
The quiet is the problem.