3. Seventeen Names #3
“I don’t need a tracker to arrest a maintenance tech.”
“You don’t need one to arrest him. You need one to build the case.” A beat. Tael still not looking up. “Your words, Torres. This morning. Then my screening needs to be better than the point.”
I am going to kill him.
“We don’t need to find him,” I say. “We know where he is.”
“Finding isn’t the only thing a tracker does.”
“It’s in the name, Vosk.”
“It’s in the job description. The name is decorative.”
Petra, from her desk, delighted: “He’s using logic, Torres.”
“Petra.”
“I’m just observing.”
“You are narrating.”
“Narration is a form of observation with audio.”
Flossie is writing again. Her pen has not slowed down. Her pen is, in fact, moving at the speed of a woman recording data for a betting pool she will absolutely not be declaring to me.
“Your call, lovey.” Warm. Utterly unhelpful.
Three feet to my left the source of the scent is waiting, and the back of my neck is doing something the rest of me has not authorized, and I can feel the whole room watching me weigh it, and there is exactly one answer that gets me out of this office in the next thirty seconds and it is the answer that takes him with me.
“Fine.” Flat. The voice of a woman who is not fine. “You’re on the team.”
“Generous.”
“Don’t push it.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You were visibly about to.”
“I have a resting face, Torres.”
“Your resting face is a provocation.”
Petra inhales audibly. The inhale is editorial.
“SPROUT,” Flossie says, gently, “new sub-folder, please.”
“Already created, Flossie. Labeled Tracker-Adjacent Banter: In Progress. Populating at speed.”
The walk to Flossie’s desk is twelve steps.
I know because I count things, because counting is what I do when the alternative is feeling, and what I’m feeling right now is the vertigo of a woman whose system has been compromised by someone she trusted, and the walk takes me past the reinforced chair.
Past him.
The scent thickens as I pass. Warm-wood-and-spice, closer now, and for a single unguarded second it resonates enough that I have to lock my jaw against the impulse to breathe deeper.
I do not slow down. I do not speed up. I maintain the exact pace of a woman who is crossing a room for case-related purposes and not noticing the temperature change around a specific chair.
His tail. I see it from the corner of my eye—I am not looking; I am absolutely not looking. The coil has loosened. The muscle is extending. Not toward Xor at Flossie's shoulder, not toward the data on the table. Toward the part of the room I’m walking through.
He catches it. His hand drops to his side, grabs the tail, yanks it back with the controlled violence of someone who has been betrayed by his own anatomy in a room full of colleagues and is furious about it.
SPROUT, chipper: “Filing under Involuntary Gestures: Corrected, Flossie. The correction has been logged. The gesture has not been logged. I am being judicious.”
“Thank you, Sprout.”
“I live to serve, and occasionally to annotate.”
I set the datapad on Flossie’s desk. I do not look at Tael. Looking at Tael is what Petra, Flossie, SPROUT, Xor, and possibly the kettle are waiting for me to do, and I am not in the business of rewarding an audience.
“1745,” I say to the desk. “Service corridor outside Maintenance Bay Three. Wear something that doesn’t look like a Draelith tracker.”
“I am a Draelith tracker.”
“Then wear something that doesn’t look like it.”
“That is an architectural limitation of my existence.”
“Figure it out, Vosk.”
His mouth does a thing. Not a smirk. Something smaller. The corner-movement version, the one-millimeter betrayal that the tail tried to commit fifteen seconds ago and got caught.
“I’ll figure it out.”
I turn. Back straight. Walking toward the door because I have a name and a timestamp and a maintenance tech to bring in, and the walk takes me away from the chair and the scent and the warmth and the tail that was reaching for me, and every step is a step in the right direction.
I don’t look back.
SENTRY, in my earpiece, quietly: “The SNAG AI has made a note.”
“What kind of note?”
“The kind I am not comfortable sharing. It pertains to postural data.”
“Delete it.”
“I have no jurisdiction over SNAG’s AI and its notation habits. I can, however, confirm that my own logs contain nothing of relevance.”
A pause.
“Nothing I am prepared to discuss, at any rate.”
“SENTRY.”
“Yes.”
“Delete your logs too.”
“…Noted.”
“Noted, or deleted?”
“Noted.”
I walk out of the SNAG office and into the corridor, and the air is station-standard and regulation-temperature and does not smell like anything that makes my lungs do somersaults. The fluorescent lighting is functional. The walls are solid. The deck plating is level.
I have a suspect. I have a case. I have a job to do.
And a briefing table full of people who stand in gaps, and a stuffed bear, and a Xarthian male whose thumb moved across his mate’s knuckles in a way that undid something structural in me.
I do not look up Draelith tail orientation.
Yet.