5. Just in Case #4
The woman in the mirror is five-nine, forty, sharp jaw, scar through the left eyebrow, and a pulse still running two beats above standard from a corridor at 1806 that I will apparently never fully regulate down from.
She looks good.
I am allowed to notice this. Nobody is going to die because I noticed I look good. Nobody is going to file a report because I spent, I check the time, forty-one minutes on a braid and a face wash.
Forty-one minutes.
He said two words in a corridor and walked away like they had cost him nothing. They cost him something. He wants to play that game, he can play it in a cockpit with a woman in civilian clothes and a braid that is not structural, and we can both spend nine hours pretending we are here for the case.
I am here for the case.
I am mostly here for the case.
I turn the light off.
0551. Bay 12.
I am four minutes early. I would have been five minutes early, except I stood outside the airlock for sixty seconds doing the breathing I do when I need my face to be the face of a woman who slept.
I did not sleep.
Tael’s ship is small. VOSK — TRACK / RECOVERY is barely visible under a new hand-painted sign which now reads HELIA’S REACH on the hull in a registry-non-compliant font that I am going to fine him for from Velarkis, specifically because I want something to argue with him about that is not the other thing.
He is here.
He is leaning against the ship, arms folded, wearing a black shirt that is not the jacket, not the windbreaker, not the vest. Civilian.
Dark. The rosette markings move along the inside of his wrists where the sleeves are pushed up, and I do not look at the rosettes, and my eyes do not track the line of them down into the cuff.
He looks up when I come through the airlock.
He does not smirk.
The silver of his eyes does something I cannot name.
His nostrils flare once. Slightly. The particular Draelith tell just absorbed a scent-data packet; his sensory system is going to be running for the next nine hours.
He does not speak for a full two seconds, which is two seconds longer than Tael Vosk has ever not spoken to me since I met him.
I clock the two seconds.
“Torres.”
“Vosk.”
He steps aside. Gestures at the airlock. “After you.”
I board. He boards behind me. The cockpit smells like him, years of scent concentrated in recycled air, and I sit in the co-pilot’s seat and breathe through my mouth for four seconds because the alternative is what my pupils want to do, which is not an operational choice I am willing to commit to on three hours of sleep and a braid I redid twice.
“Temperature in here—“
“Five degrees above human standard.”
“It’s like a sauna with a dashboard.”
“Adjust it.”
I adjust it. Three degrees down. The thermostat acknowledges the input.
JINX, unmuting himself exactly on schedule: “Environmental modification detected. Cockpit temperature reduced 3.2 degrees. I am logging this as a domestic adjustment.”
SENTRY: “Logging as operational accommodation under coordination protocol, Section Three.”
JINX: “Sentry, you are going to log everything about this trip as Section Three.”
SENTRY: “That is the correct section.”
Tael, quietly, in the pilot’s seat: “JINX.”
“Operational parameters only. For the duration of the transit.” A beat. “Per transit, however. Not per arrival.”
“JINX.”
“Noted.”
Tael settles into the pilot’s seat. Tail sliding into the footwell. His knee is eight inches from mine and will be eight inches from mine for the next nine hours, because there is no geometry of this cockpit that makes it closer.
I pull out a folder. Actual paper, because a hard copy cannot be quietly edited by whoever edited my camera schedule. I read. He flies.
Two hours in, the comm chirps. Flossie.
“Loveys. SPROUT has been watching the Velarkis node.”
“And?”
“It went offline forty minutes ago. Someone wiped it.”
Tael’s hands tighten on the yoke. My fingers tightened on the folder.
“Trap,” I say.
“Or cover-up.”
“Or both.”
Flossie, quieter: “Be careful, both of you. Something about this isn’t shaped the way I thought it was.”
SPROUT, earnest: “I am providing statistical validation, not comfort. Comfort is available upon request.”
“Thank you, SPROUT. I am refusing both.”
“Acknowledged.”
The comm closes.
Hours of transit corridor. A wiped relay node. A handler, and a handler’s boss, and a handler’s boss’s client somewhere in the dark at the end of this trail.
In the pilot’s seat, Tael’s scent layers into the recycled air like a second climate, and his knee is eight inches from mine, and his tail, in the footwell, is not rigid and not in the tight spiral. It is the other one.
Comfortable. SENTRY said. In the voice she uses when she is being helpful.
I flew into this trip to build a case. I have a file open that is not the case, and a tail I can apparently read now, and no intention of examining either one for nine hours.
“Nine hours,” I say. To the navigation display. To the stars. To anything that is not the male sitting to my left.
“Nine hours,” he says.
We fly.