4. Thirty Seconds #3
“They asked me to handle something. Transport it. I don’t know what it is.
They paid me the advance. They said they’d be in touch about timing.
” His hands, cuffed, rise as far as they can go.
Palms up. The compound is visible on his skin in the corridor lighting; I would not see it without Draelith optics but he can feel it, I can tell he can feel it, because he is looking at his own hands like they belong to someone he does not want to be.
“I swear I don’t know anything else. I’m a maintenance tech.
I extended a cycle. I transported a box. That’s what they pay me for. Please.”
Torres is writing on her tablet. Every word. Time-stamped.
“The relay node,” I say. “Where in the Velarkis sector?”
Harkin gives us coordinates. Remote. Low-traffic. The node where people move data they do not want on the major network.
“Handlers ever use names?”
“No.”
“Accents?”
“Corpo. That’s all I can say. They sounded corpo. Clipped. Scripted. Like a call center but expensive.”
“Corpo.” I hold Torres’s eyes. She holds mine. We don’t say SRS or corporate procurement. We don’t have to.
“That’s all I know. I swear. Please. My sister—“
“Your sister will be informed that her brother is in Junction One detention,” Torres says. “Not before.”
She nods to her officers. They walk Harkin out.
The corridor clears. Suddenly it is empty air, and Torres and me, and the ambient hum of station ventilation.
She breathes out. Once. Controlled. The breath of a woman who has been holding her ribcage in a specific configuration for nine minutes. I want to put my hand on her ribcage and feel the release.
“You extended claws.”
“I know.”
“In a station corridor. On a detainee.”
“I know, Torres.”
“You said you wouldn’t touch him.”
“I didn’t.”
“You extended claws at him.”
“I extended claws between him and you. I need you to record that distinction on the report because it is important and also because it is true.”
She looks at me. The look holds.
“I’ll record the distinction.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me.”
I unzip the vest. The fabric releases across my chest, the crest going slack. I shrug it off one shoulder at a time. Hand it back to her.
She takes it.
I hold the vest a half-second longer than I need to.
Long enough that our fingers meet on the fabric, and her eyes lift to mine, and the corridor narrows to the eighteen inches it has been narrowing to since I walked into it.
The contact is brief. Deliberate. My skin against hers for the first time, and the heat of it travels up my arm like a claim I am not yet allowed to make.
“Good work, Torres.”
Low. There were at least three other things he could have said and he chose the one he could get away with.
I let the vowels sit in my mouth a fraction of a beat too long.
The word I wanted is not work. The word I wanted has no business on a detention log or in her ear, and it is the same word my tail has been trying to say since her office.
She knows.
Her face doesn’t move. Not a muscle. The discipline of a woman who just stood at a bend and listened to a male break under silence holds the way it held the bend.
Her scent shifts. Specifically. Not the warmth-of-exertion that’s been layering her afternoon, not the adrenaline-acidity of the intercept.
Something cleaner, sharper: the chemical fingerprint of a human female body reacting to a register her nervous system has just routed through a circuit she did not know she had wired.
It hits my palate like permission I have not been given.
My overlay logs it. The color is new. It goes into a placeholder in my sensory system that I have been keeping open since I walked into her office, and the placeholder now has a data point, and the data point is she heard what I meant.
I let her keep the vest. I let my hand drop.
I do not smile. I do not let my tail do the thing it is attempting to do: the slow, deliberate curl that would tell her exactly what my body wants to do with the space between us.
A professional delivery. An equipment return.
She has just completed a task, and I am not, under any circumstance, going to let my face admit that I have completed a different one.
“I’ll see you at 0600,” she says. Flat. Professional. The voice of a woman running a post-detention debrief, whose body just told me something her mouth will never say.
“0600.”
She turns. Tablet up. Back straight. Walking.
JINX, in my comm, reverently: “SENTRY just filed that under Professional: Acknowledged.”
“Good.”
“She knows it wasn’t.”
“Good.”
“Her pulse moved twenty-two percent in six seconds, Tael. On good work. Imagine what the other phrase would have done.”
“JINX.”
“I’m imagining, Tael. I am imagining.”
SENTRY, crisp, across the shared channel: “The file is archived.”
JINX: “Accessibly?”
SENTRY: silence.
JINX: “Sentry. You and I both know.”
SENTRY: “The file is archived.”
I pick up my jacket. I walk.
My tail is in a spiral. My claws are retracted.
I take the long way back to the SNAG office.
I need the minutes.