4. Thirty Seconds #2
I did not decide to extend them. They are out anyway, ten points of black keratin riding the edges of fingers that are gripping Harkin’s wrist with a pressure one degree short of breaking bone.
The wrench clatters to the deck plating.
The sound is distant. What is not distant is the absolute, primal certainty that no one puts hands on what is mine to protect.
“Don’t.” My voice has gone somewhere it hasn’t been since SRS. The extraction voice. Quiet. Final. “Don’t move, Harkin.”
He doesn’t move.
Torres is already in position. She covered the distance to Harkin’s other side while I was intercepting: no wasted motion, the choreography of a woman who read the room fast enough to trust one flank to me while she took the other. Her hand is on her sidearm. Not drawn. The threat doing the work.
Her officers cuff him in eleven seconds.
They seat Harkin on a maintenance crate.
The wrench goes into an evidence bag. Torres is breathing evenly, because Torres is Torres, but her pupils have expanded a full millimeter, and her eyes move from my face to my hand to the ten points of black keratin that did not retract on their own the way they did in Bay 7.
“Vosk.”
“Yes.”
“Hands.”
I look at my hands. The claws. The pressure signature on Harkin’s wrist where I had him.
I retract the claws. It takes two tries.
The first try is the try of a system that does not believe the threat is over.
The second try is the try of a system that has been reminded, by Torres’s voice, that the threat is cuffed and seated and that the male standing in this bay with his claws out is not required to be the male solving this.
Her voice is the only thing that works. That fact is not lost on me.
My fingers go soft. Harkin’s wrist goes unbruised.
Torres does not thank me. Torres would never thank me in front of a detainee. Her chin lifts a fraction—the micro-signal that is, in her vocabulary, the equivalent of a hand on my forearm and a word I will never hear her say.
“Harkin.” She walks to the crate. Her voice is back to station-issue, the level-the-way-a-blade-is-level register. “You just assaulted a civilian contractor in front of two Junction One officers. That’s seven years’ detention before we even open the calibration log. Talk to me.”
“I want a lawyer.”
“You’ll get one. After you tell me what the compound on your hands is.”
“I don’t know what—“
“You have it on your hands right now.” She nods to me without looking.
“He can see it. You’re sitting in a holding bay covered in a controlled substance you’ve been handling within the last forty-eight hours , and I am offering you approximately ninety seconds to get out in front of this before it becomes the worst day of your life. ”
Harkin’s mouth closes and is going to stay closed. I can see it in his jaw, the same shut-down I told her was coming, arriving on schedule and forty seconds ahead of even my window. What comes out of this jaw is going to be whatever his handler told him to say.
I do not say I told you so. I do not look at Torres, but I keep my eyes on Harkin and I let the silence sit.
Torres keeps working. A second pass, a third angle. She tries the sister. She tries the time pressure. She tries the lawyer, framed the way a lawyer framed at the right moment is an olive branch and not a wall.
Wall. Wall. Wall.
She stops. Breathes out. Half a breath. The breath of a woman who has just watched the exact scenario play out the way a civilian contractor predicted nine minutes ago.
“Vosk.”
“Here.”
“A word.”
I follow her one step down the corridor. Two meters from Harkin, not out of earshot but out of the detainee’s immediate space. Her back is to him. Her voice drops to a frequency my senses register, but the officers will not.
“He’s closing.”
“He’s closed.”
“Your adjunct.”
“Yes.”
“Walk me through the limits again. Word for word.”
“No contact. No verbal threats. I stand there. I do not smile. I do not speak. You take him thirty seconds down the corridor and come back. Whatever happens in that silence is whatever he brings to it.”
“If his counsel raises coercion—“
“I sign a statement the moment we file the report. I made no threat, made no contact, did not speak. Your officers witness. Detention logged clean. The only thing in the room between me and Harkin will be his own imagination.”
“His imagination is going to be vivid.”
“Yes.”
Her eyes hold mine. The weight of what she’s about to authorize is sitting behind them: four years of rulebook, a scar she wears like rank, and whatever put the scar there. The trust in that look is more intimate than anything physical.
“Three weeks,” I say. Quiet. Not pushing. Handing her the math book.
Three weeks. Maren Torek. The window.
She exhales.
“Do it.”
Two words. Low. Costing.
“Understood.”
“Thirty seconds. Not a second more. If I hear your voice, if I hear one word, I pull you out of this corridor and off this case.”
“You won’t hear my voice.”
“Vosk.”
“You won’t.”
She walks back to Harkin. Addresses him by name, informs him she’s discussing next steps for protocol reasons, gestures to her officer to take point.
Professional. Clean. The moment any competent attorney would sign off on without blinking.
That she is handing me this, trusting me with the silence, sits in my body like possession.
She and the officer walk thirty seconds down the corridor.
I am alone with him for the time her boots make sixty steps.
Harkin watches her go.
He watches her because I am not moving, and his options for where to put his eyes are limited. Good. Let him look at the space where she was. Let him understand that the only thing left in the corridor is me.
I breathe in.
The overlay lights up. The compound on his hands. The copper of four months’ guilt. The amber flare of fresh fear, climbing. I let him see me take it.
I breathe out.
My pupils narrow. Silver going to slit. Harkin sees it happen and his cortisol dumps; my overlay flashes with the chemical shift like a warning light. The fear is correct. I have not moved. I do not need to.
I do not move.
My tail extends behind me along the deck plating. Not the spiral. Rigid. Drawn. Harkin’s eyes track it and stay.
I do not move.
I breathe in again. Deeper. His scent floods my palate. I let him watch me taste him. Let him understand I am reading every chemical he is producing and finding none of it interesting enough to waste words on.
His breathing goes shallow.
At the bend, Torres’s boots stop.
She is listening. SENTRY has not muted her feed, and Torres has not asked her to, and through the open channel I can hear Torres’s pulse the way my sensory system hears weather systems: a frequency, a pressure, a thing about to break.
Her pulse is not steady.
The knowledge that she is listening, that she is standing at the bend with her heart rate elevated while I break a man in silence, does something to the configuration of my tail that two years of freelance discipline is now holding in place by force.
The urge to let it curl, to let the claim show, is almost stronger than the discipline. Almost.
Harkin breaks at twenty-two seconds.
A crack in his throat, the beginning of a word.
I raise my claws to my neck as I watch him intently.
His mouth closes.
A gesture that will read on every legal review as Tael Vosk standing silent in a corridor for thirty seconds, and is simultaneously the filthiest thing I have done with my hands in two years.
The dominance of it, the absolute control of another man’s voice with nothing but presence, and knowing she is listening makes it better.
Torres’s boots start moving.
She walks back into the corridor with the face of a woman who just ran mundane detainee protocol. That is what the audio log will confirm.
Her pupils are dilated.
Her scent has shifted.
Harkin talks before she has fully turned around.
He did it for the money. It was not much money. That is the worst part for him: not much money. Enough to cover a terrible year. Not enough to be evil about.
Anonymous relay. Payment routed through a node in the Velarkis sector. He extended one diagnostic cycle. He swears on the life of a sister whose name I do not ask for that he extended one diagnostic cycle. Bay 7. Four months ago.
“And this week?”
He hesitates.
“This week, Harkin.”
“They contacted me again. Two days ago. Same relay. Different job.”
“Different how?”