16. Induction
Induction
Natalie
I turn.
The male in the chamber doorway is — I recognize him in the second I turn and my stomach turns with him.
Silver-eyed. Charcoal-skinned. The rosettes along his forearms are gray at the edges — not silver-gray, the gray of dying vegetation, the necrosis a Draelith male’s chemistry produces when his regulatory systems have been failing long enough to eat the tissue that should be broadcasting.
His face is thinner than it was in the corridor at V-6.
The skin under his jaw has the sallow pull of weight he could not afford to lose.
His lips are thin. His canines, as he exhales a half-breath, flash at his teeth — not the seductive flash Tael’s canines have, the skeletal flash of a male whose tissue has receded from the enamel.
His silver eyes have gone flat.
No light.
The scent coming off him reaches me a half-second after I register the face. It is wrong— not the healthy pheromone signature of a bonded or identified male but something sour underneath, the smell of chemistry eating itself. Why?
I do not want him near me.
“Kesh Vorrin.”
He does not reply.
His eyes flick to the tactical kit at my shoulder — to the Junction One insignia stitched at the collar — and then to my face. He reads the nameplate inside a second.
“Torres. Step away from the Xarthian. Slowly.”
His voice is the rough register of someone conserving breath. His right hand holds a sidearm low at his hip, angled up a quarter-inch, the ready-low carry of a Tier 2 tracker who has been trained to put a round through a human female’s sternum inside a half-second if she gives him reason to.
I do not give him reason to.
I keep compressing.
“She will live or she will die. You bought her a chance. Walk with me.”
“I’m not leaving her.”
“Your tracker will return to this chamber in sixty seconds. When he does, he will find you here, and he will, at that point, react in ways that cost both of you.”
“Which is what?”
“Walk. Now. I will not ask twice.”
The math runs fast.
Tael returns in sixty seconds. Kesh is armed.
Tier 2. Sick Draelith males run on crisis adrenaline in a way that makes them harder to drop, not easier.
If I fight him here — unarmed, mid-compression, in a tight chamber — I die.
The Xarthian dies. Tael returns to two dead females and kills the station.
If I walk, he takes me somewhere. Tael tracks. Tael arrives. The fight is Tael’s.
Walk is the play.
I step away from the Xarthian.
Her pulse on the panel is at thirty-two.
“Weapons on the floor. Sidearm first.”
I take my sidearm out. I place it on the floor.
“The neural baton.”
I take it out. I place it on the floor.
He does not ask for the MP blade at my ankle. His overlay does not, by his expression, register it. The blade is old MP stock, long out of any equipment overlay.
I leave it.
“Walk.”
I walk.
He is two meters behind me.
His footfall is a half-beat slower than a healthy Draelith’s.
I do not know what is wrong with him. I do not know why his rosettes are gray at the edges.
I do not know why his skin has the sallow pull of a body that is eating itself from the inside.
I know only that he is dying, and that he is the male Tael identified at V-6 as former colleague, terminated, off-book, grievance unknown, and that whatever his grievance is, it has brought me two decks below Torek’s chamber and is walking me toward a door whose signage I do not want to read.
The signage shifts as we descend. Subject becomes Induction. Pair-Bond Induction Chamber, Observation Lab Three.
Pair-bond induction.
My stomach turns over.
I do not know what that means in a technical sense, and I do not need to, because whatever it means, the word induction applied to the word pair-bond is not something a healthy facility puts on a door.
The door opens at Kesh’s keying.
As I step through, my eyes catch on a prep tray beside the inner door. The tray holds a standard research setup. Forceps. Clamps. A medical-grade scalpel in a foam recess.
My hand passes two inches over it.
The scalpel goes into my palm.
He is at the console across the chamber, keying a sequence.
He does not see.
I stop at the center of the room.
The chamber is clean the way the corridors are clean.
A floor drain sits in the center of the tile, with new grout around it.
A padded restraint chair stands against the far wall with its arms folded down — adjustable, considerate, recently sanitized.
Somebody designed this room. Somebody submitted drawings.
Somebody else approved them, and a third person invoiced for the drain.
He keys a second sequence. A small light on the console goes amber. He keys the external observation channel. The speaker on the exterior wall goes live.
Tael is going to hear this.
Kesh turns to face me.
Four meters between us.
I keep the four meters.
“Stand where you are.”
“I’m not moving.”
He does not come closer. Not yet. His sidearm is in his right hand, loose, pointed at the floor. His blade — I see it now — is in a sheath at his left hip. He is dying and his reflexes are still, by the way he is holding his body, Tier 2.
My hand at my side. The scalpel in my palm.
My stomach is sick.
Not fear. The sick of a woman who is in a room with a male who is going to do something to her.
I breathe.
“Tell me what’s happening.”
“Why?”
“Because I would like to understand.”
“Your tracker is behind you and will be at this door in a minute. You are not going to change what is going to happen by understanding it.”
“I would like to understand anyway.”
A pause. He reads my face in the way that his kind reads a face when his overlay is still trained to clock human micro-expressions.
“The ceiling manifold delivers a pheromone compound. At saturation, the compound triggers pair-identification biology in a Draelith male within proximity of a compatible female. My body will drop canines. My canines will set a mate-mark on you. I will not choose to. My body will. The compound overrides the discipline.”
He says this flatly as if reporting a specification.
“A mate-mark?”
“Yes.”
“You are going to force a bond on me.”
“Yes.”
My stomach drops as the word lands in a way I have not had a word land in some years.
Tael has not used the word bond with me. He has used the word mate, and he has held his canines off a place at my throat when his biology was asking him to use them, and he has let me hold my thumb to a matching place on his throat without ever telling me what either of our throats were for.
I know the word. I do not know the protocol.
And this male is the one who is going to teach me the protocol.
I breathe.
“Why?”
“Because when your tracker arrives at this door, he will clock another male’s pair-signature on your throat. His body has been compensating for five days at a baseline that is already drifting. Our mark will accelerate the cascade. He will die within the hour.”
My whole body goes still.
“The cascade.”
“Yes.”
“What cascade?”
He reads my face again. Slower this time. Whatever he sees on it surprises him.
“He has not told you?”
“Told me what, Kesh.”
“Oh.”
The single syllable.
It is the first time since he walked into the upstairs chamber that his voice has done anything other than flat.
“Tell me, Kesh.” I shout, panic blooming.
“There is a condition. When a Draelith pair-identifies a female and does not complete the bond — and the bond is completed by the mark, not by the act — his regulatory systems fail. Over eighteen months. He dies.”
The act. Last night. The mark he did not set.
I thanked him. Last night, when he did not mark me, I said thank you, and he said you are welcome, Natalie, and the thing I was thanking him for is killing him.
The chamber is quiet.
The speaker at the external wall is broadcasting.
Tael is on the other side of the door. Tael is hearing this.
Tael, who has been running his body at an off-register I have been clocking and not naming for days, is hearing Kesh Vorrin tell me he has been dying since the morning he walked into my office.
He recited his own death in the dark, with my mouth on his knuckles, and he called it later.
I put that away. Kesh does not get that fight. My mouth does not open.
I cannot make it open.
My hand on the scalpel is, for the first time since I palmed it, shaking.
“He has not told you,” Kesh says. Quieter. “I assumed he had. I assumed that the woman he pair-identified would have been told what the identification was going to cost him. That is the male I knew, at least. Apparently four years have changed him.”
“Four years.”
“Yes.”
“Kesh — how do you know this? How do you know the condition?”
A pause.
“Because I am dying of it.”
He says it plainly. No theater.
“My mate’s name was Mira. She died four years ago on an operation at Tyrre that your tracker was running for SRS. She was in the wrong corridor at the wrong minute. Your tracker refused to kill a child in the cargo hold. The refusal cascaded. My mate died in the cascade.”
The chamber is still quiet.
I cannot speak.
“I have been dying since. I was supposed to die inside eighteen months. I stayed at the place she died — Tyrre has a residual chemistry in the walls, she had been there long enough, the walls held enough of her signature that I could regulate. For some time. Two and a half years. Then the chemistry thinned. Eighteen months ago, I went into the active cascade. SRS had already terminated me. BioSystems offered a configuration in which my death would be useful. By month six I knew I was the subject, not the partner.”
The door in the corridor behind me makes a sound.
Not a slam. An impact. A body hitting something.
The first contractor.
I do not turn.
“Did you leave?”
“I tried.”
Another impact on the corridor wall. Closer. The sound of a sidearm discharge. Twice. A voice cut off mid-syllable.
Tael has the first contractor.
Kesh does not react.
One more question. The one I cannot stop myself asking.
“Did you think — killing Tael — would bring her back?”