4. Thirty Seconds
Thirty Seconds
Tael
Torres is already here. Of course she is.
Two Junction One security officers flank the bay entrance. Calm. The backup you keep when you don’t expect trouble and know how to handle it anyway.
She turns a quarter-rotation. Sees me. The scar catches the corridor lighting.
The dark eyes take in my civilian jacket, the dark shirt, the attempt at not-a-Draelith-tracker, and an expression moves across her face that I would trade operational intelligence to decode.
Something sharp. Something that echoes in my gut and stays there, heavy and interested.
Then she holds out a folded square of cloth.
“Put this on.”
“What is it?”
“Junction One Security windbreaker. Human male, medium.” A beat.
“It’s what I could grab. Station regulations require any non-JO personnel assisting in a detention to wear identifying insignia.
I can’t walk a civilian contractor into a holding situation without it.
If Harkin’s counsel gets creative, the chain of custody collapses and he walks. ”
I take the windbreaker. Black. Junction One crest on the left collar in reflective silver. Station-issue, weight-graded for corridor work, designed around the shoulders of a human male who is probably six feet maximum.
I am not six feet maximum.
I shrug out of the jacket. Pull the windbreaker on over the dark shirt.
The fabric settles across my shoulders with the protest of material asked to do a job it was not designed for: snug across the chest, riding up at the waist, sleeves ending two inches short of my wrists.
The zipper refuses to close for the last four inches over my sternum.
The Junction One crest sits somewhere between my collarbone and my throat and telegraphs OFFICIAL to anyone who isn’t looking too closely and STRUCTURAL FAILURE to anyone who is.
Torres looks.
The look is brief. Professional. She is assessing whether the insignia is visible, whether this is going to hold up to a legal review.
That is what I am choosing to believe she is assessing.
What my overlay is reading is different: the slight flare of her pupils, the way her gaze snags for half a second on the tight pull of fabric across my torso before she forces it back up.
Her pulse moves. I can hear it. One beat off rhythm, instantly corrected.
“It’s short in the sleeves,” I say. Mild. I watch the pulse in her throat and catalog the exact shade of pink that has climbed her skin.
“I can see that.”
“Also the chest.”
“I can see that too.”
“Should I stretch-test it?”
“No.”
I stretch-test it anyway. A deliberate roll of the shoulders.
The fabric shifts across my back. The crest lifts a quarter-inch up my torso.
The two inches of bare forearm past the cuffs go on display, the rosette markings traveling down the inside of my wrists in their dark whorl pattern, and Torres’s eyes, which have been rigorously above my collarbone, drop exactly once and snap back up.
Pink. The skin above the uniform collar, goes pink. Heat blooms under it, visible to me in the overlay as a warm-gold flush that has nothing to do with exertion and everything to do with the fact that she just watched a Draelith male fill a jacket that was never meant to hold him.
I am going to remember this moment for the rest of my operational career. The knowledge that I can make her pulse skip with a roll of my shoulders is deeply, deeply satisfying.
“Vosk.”
“Torres.”
“Take it off.”
“You said it was regulation.”
“I said regulation, not tourniquet. Take it off before you split a seam in a service corridor and I have to file a wardrobe incident report.”
JINX, in my earpiece, reverently: “I am filing this under Exceeded Expectations: Physical. The category had two entries before today. It now has three.”
“JINX.”
“I am also noting that Sentry’s audio feed is active and I am formally requesting permission to share this data with her.”
“Do not share that data.”
“She might find it interesting.”
“JINX.”
“It is in service of inter-AI diplomatic relations.”
SENTRY, from Torres’s earpiece, crisp as a pressed uniform: “Any data transfer from the Draelith AI regarding non-operational observations will be refused and logged as inappropriate contact.”
JINX: “She called it contact. That’s progress.”
I pull the windbreaker off. The release of the tight fabric across my chest is almost as good as the way her eyes track the motion before she can stop herself.
Torres hands me a second folded cloth without looking.
Smaller, this one, a black field vest with the crest on the shoulder.
A compromise. A vest leaves the question of what fits and what doesn’t in the hands of whatever I wore underneath, which is a black shirt that has served me faithfully for years and has never once required a stretch test.
I put the vest on. The vest fits. It also leaves my forearms bare where the sleeves are pushed up, the markings on display, and I do not miss the way her gaze snags again before she locks it down.
“Better,” she says.
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. Stand over there.”
I stand over there. The corridor is narrow, eighteen inches between where she is and where I have been assigned, and the arrangement puts us close enough that the steady low heat of her body, five degrees below my baseline, is a map my senses draw without permission.
Her warmth on my left. The cold metal of the bay door on my right.
My entire thermoregulatory system making calculations that have nothing to do with Harkin and everything to do with how little it would take to close the gap, put my hand on the wall beside her head, and find out what that pink skin tastes like.
She pulls up the detention protocol on her tablet. Skims it. Marks two sections. Standard. It should not be this attractive. It is.
“Torres.”
“What.”
“A word on methodology.”
“The methodology is on the screen, Vosk.”
“The methodology is procedural. I’m offering an adjunct.”
She doesn’t look up from the tablet. “Offer.”
“Harkin is going to close. I watched the Bay 7 footage. He had eye contact with someone on comms during the gap; he wasn’t acting alone in the loop; he was acting on instructions.
Males who act on instructions lawyer up when the instructions run out.
He’ll be shut inside ninety seconds of you reading him the rights. ”
“That’s a prediction.”
“That’s a pattern. I’ve interrogated males with this jaw. They are expensive to crack through procedural channels.”
“So?”
“So. You run the detention clean. By the book. I stand in the corner. When he closes, and he will close, you walk him down the corridor for thirty seconds. I stay with him. No words. No contact. I stand there and let him look at me and I let him think through what a Draelith tracker with SRS history might consider doing to a man who cost the woman in charge of this station four years of sleep. When you come back, he talks.”
“No.”
“Torres.”
“No.” Her eyes come up from the tablet. “Vosk. No. I walk into a station corridor with a detainee and I leave him alone with a civilian contractor whose SRS termination file I am still reading, and any competent defense attorney walks him out on coercion within forty-eight hours. The whole case collapses. Harkin walks, his handler goes quiet, Maren dies. No.”
“I’m not going to touch him.”
“He doesn’t have to be touched to make the argument.”
“Then it’s not the argument that matters. It’s what he tells me.”
“Vosk. I said no.”
The jaw is set. A career of Military Police staring down a Draelith offering a shortcut in a service corridor, and there is not an inch of give in her.
I hear what I hear: a woman who has stood over the bodies of cases that died through shortcuts, and has decided that dying slowly through channels is the only dying she is willing to participate in.
Authority on her looks like something I want under my hands.
“Understood.”
“Is it?”
“It is.”
“Then stand over there and let me run the detention.”
I stand over there. My tail is in a spiral. My claws are retracted. My working configuration is fully engaged, and I am not, at any point in the next nine minutes, going to improvise. The effort of not improvising is already costing me.
“Positions.” Torres, to her officers. Clipped. In command. The voice that runs a station.
The bay door opens.
Harkin is inside, stowing tools into a locker. He looks up. Sees Torres. Sees the uniforms. Sees me in the borrowed vest with the Junction One crest, and something happens in his face that is not what I expected.
Not fear first. Not guilt first.
Calculation.
Amber flares in my overlay, a late fear response catching up. Copper underneath: guilt, the sour compound has been marinating in what he did. And on his hands: the synthetic. Fresh. Days old, maybe hours.
But the first thing was calculation. The look of someone counting exits.
“Torres,” I say. Low. Under the detention protocol. The tracker voice. “He’s thinking about—“
The wrench is already in his hand.
He pulled it from the locker before we came in.
Must have. Heard the boots, heard the positioning, and took the two seconds he had to palm a tool he could swing.
It comes up now, short arc, close range, aimed at Torres’s temple because she’s closest, because she’s the one giving orders, because she is the physical shape of the thing he is about to lose.
My body moves before my brain authorizes it.
Three and a half meters of bay and I cross it sideways, a lateral shift, the kind a predator makes without committing weight, the kind my training gave me and my biology has just taken over. My arm comes up. My shoulder meets the wrench. The impact thuds through the deltoid and into my ribcage.
My claws are out.