8. Two Blades #2
Both AIs go silent. The only sound in the cockpit is the ship at idle and a Draelith male breathing through a wound across his ribs, and I have seven minutes and a field kit and hands I am going to put on him.
I open the kit.
I cut his shirt off with my utility knife. I do not ask him to lift his arms; asking would be an exchange, and I am not in the mood for one.
The rib wound is diagonal, outside of the lower ribs angling toward the sternum, deep, not through the intercostal but close, bleeding steadily. The shoulder is under the collar and the blood has soaked the dark fabric and I will get to it. The ribs are faster.
I kneel between his knees.
The cockpit floor is not generous and his legs do not fold short, so kneeling puts my chest level with his ribcage and my face inches from his sternum and my hands on him in the configuration a medic takes with a patient who is six-foot-five of bare-chested Draelith and has just gone feral in a corridor for her.
He went feral. He contained a corridor full of hostiles, and then he saw blood on my arm and he went. Something is happening in my core that does not have words.
Focus, Torres.
I press the antiseptic gauze to the wound. His skin is hot under my palm, and the rosettes shift across his ribs with the breath he takes, and at the second my palm meets bare skin—
He purrs.
Low. Deep. It rolls out of his chest into the couch and into my palm through the gauze, and from my palm it travels, I can feel it travel, wrist, forearm, elbow, sternum, where it meets my heartbeat and disagrees with it.
Not the volume of the bar. Continuous. As if his body has been holding it back for an hour.
He does not kill it. He does not bother.
I look up. Pupils blown. The tips of his ears are a darker charcoal.
The corner of his mouth doing the half-inch that is, for him, a full grin.
He is sitting with a blade wound across his ribs and a slash on his shoulder he has not mentioned and his entire body humming through my palm, and his face is not sorry about any of it.
“Vosk.”
“Torres.”
“You’re—”
“I know.”
“This is the thing your body does in proximity to a female.”
“It’s a thing my body does in proximity to one female, Torres, and we’ve established that, so let’s get on with the next question.”
I sit on that for two seconds. Then I press the gauze.
The purr deepens at the press. His abdominals tighten under my bracing hand, corded, hot, the architecture built along predator lines and not bulk, and his thigh under my elbow has gone tense in a way I am cataloguing without permission.
His scent is in my face at this range, warm wood and spice and male, a body that has been working at full capacity and is now sitting still and bleeding while a female he has identified as a mate puts her hands on his skin.
Mate. The word arrives in my head before my mouth catches up. I file it. I am going to be unfiling it inside a minute.
The bleeding slows under my gauze faster than I expect. Faster than human medicine. The briefing said accelerated regeneration, and I read the line and did not understand it the way I understand it now, which is that the wound is closing under my hand in real time. Hours, not days.
I apply the bio-adhesive and smooth the seal with the side of my thumb, and the purr at my thumb is the loudest it has been, and his pupils are at full dilation and his hands are flat on the couch beside his thighs and his claws are not extended.
His claws are not extended. His hands have gone soft on the couch.
The species briefing was specific about what retracted claws mean when a male is this close to a female he has identified. I know what it means. He knows I know.
I sit back on my heels. He does not move.
“Vosk.”
“Torres.”
“Mate. At the keeper’s counter. You said it instead of liaison.”
“I did.”
“Define it. Plain language.”
The half-grin sharpens. “Jixians read pheromones, sweetheart. He’d have smelled me lying if I’d said liaison. So I told him the truth.”
The sweetheart slides under the rest of it. I do not let him see what it does.
“The truth.”
“My body identified you as compatible for pair-bonding the second you walked into my case. I have been managing it. The management has been visible to you. Tonight it failed in a corridor when I saw a blade on your forearm, and my body is telling you the rest through every part of me that hasn’t been disciplined into silence, and I am sitting on my own couch bleeding in front of you, and I am not going to apologize for any of it.
” His eyes are steady. His claws are still soft on the couch.
“That’s the plain-language version, Torres.
The short version is yes, the word means what you think it means, and I picked it on purpose, and I’d pick it again. ”
I do not answer him aloud.
I sit on my heels with a Draelith male’s eyes on me and a patch sealing over a wound he took for me, and I run back through the days since he walked into my office the way I run a case file when one piece of evidence has just reorganized the timeline.
The smirks. The too-long looks. The hand on the small of my back.
Sweetheart, four times in a bar. The thumb on the bare strip of skin at my hip. The bunk he made up for me. Mate.
I have been filing the wrong file.
I file the new one.
I reach for the second patch, because the second patch is the work and the work is what is keeping me upright, and as I reach across him I see the shoulder.
Wet. A long slash from the collarbone down across the deltoid, bleeding more than the shirt let on.
He took it from the Grolic and has sat on it through the ribs and the purr and the mate conversation and has not once mentioned it.
Of course he hasn’t. He took two blades for me and let me work on the visible one first.
My hands stop being unsteady because my body has decided to be furious instead, and furious is a thing I have muscle memory for.
“You took two.”
“I took two.”
“You don’t get to do that, Vosk. You don’t get to take two blades and call it operational and sit on the second one for ten minutes and purr at me through the patch like it’s a romantic comedy. Pick a register and stay in it.”
“I have picked a register.”
“What register.”
“The one I’m in.”
I have no response to that.
I press the second patch. The purr comes back at the contact, and he does not bother to suppress it.
The rosettes on his shoulder move under my palm the way the ones on his ribs did, and my hand is on the bare shoulder.
He took two blades so I would take none, and I am a woman who has spent four years running a rule that said caring was a luxury I could not afford, and the rule is, I can feel it through my palm and through the purr in the cockpit air, not holding.
I seal the patch. I do not sit back. I look at him and he looks at me, and we don’t look away for longer than I have held a look for anyone in five years.
I break it first, because I am running out of things to do.
SENTRY: “Charge neutralized. Confirm?”
JINX: “Confirmed. Depolarized. Six minutes twelve, with me on hardware.”
SENTRY: “Under my protocol.”
JINX: “Under my supervision. Port thrusters at ninety-four percent. One emergency burn is survivable, only forty minutes under load. Recommend immediate departure. Destination?”
Tael’s eyes come to mine. “I know a place.”
“Of course you do.”
“A cache. Old mining outpost, decommissioned, sixteen-minute jump. I refitted the main berth years ago. Not on anyone’s registry. Off the Velarkis grid.”
“You have a refitted cache sixteen minutes from a refitted kill zone?”
“Correct.”
“When were you going to tell me?”
“When we needed it.”
“I want to know about who that male was.”
“At the cache.”
“And the rest of what you said.”
“At the cache.” He holds my eyes. “Torres. I am bleeding on my couch and my biology is telling you the truth and your hands are pink at the cuticles with my blood, and the male who sent that team is watching us through a balcony I can’t see from this cockpit.
I can have one conversation at a time. The first one is the jump.
The second one is everything else. You’ll get the second one. I am not running.”
I sit with that.
“Sixteen minutes.”
“Fine. Sixteen minutes.”
I stand. My knees do not quite hold for the first second.
I take the co-pilot’s seat; he takes the yoke.
The shield cycles green, the port thrusters spin up at ninety-four, and Helia’s Reach releases the clamps and angles up through the Velarkis cloud cover, and the node falls away into the rust-colored haze.
I sit with my cardigan rolled up over the dressing on my forearm and his blood drying on the shoulder of it and the word mate in my mouth like a coin I have not decided how to spend.
I do not look at him. I look at his hand on the yoke. Steady. The right has retracted to smooth black fingertips. The claws on the left are still half out. Even now, a male whose biology is telling the truth about him without permission.
He sees me looking, but I do not look away.
The jump drive engages, and his voice, low, just before the stars stretch, at a register I have not heard from him and which my body files as new:
“Sixteen minutes, sweetheart.”
It lands the way his hand did on my back at the keeper’s counter. Quiet. Deliberate. Still working under my skin long after the moment has passed.