18. Clean
Clean
Tael
I carry her.
Her weight against my chest. Her arm around my neck. Her face at my shoulder.
Her pulse where my forearm crosses her back: one hundred and twelve.
I count it the whole walk. There is a corridor, and there are bodies in it, and there is a manifest to build and a comm to make, and under all of it, at the floor of me, there is one number.
The corridors are empty.
At the junction before the Torek chamber, I pass the first of the three contractors I went through on the way in. Throat open. Sidearm in his off-hand. Natalie’s face against my shoulder does not turn.
One hundred and nine.
The second at the next junction.
The third at the chamber door. I used the claws on this one at a register I am not proud of. His face is, by any professional standard, not extractable for identification. Natalie’s hand at my kit tightens by a quarter-inch as we pass him. She does not speak.
I do not need her to.
One hundred and six.
Past the chambers. The Krellan female. The Juneth pair. The Xarthian female at 41-B whose pulse on the panel is stable at forty-eight. She is going to live.
Twenty bodies.
We cannot move twenty sedated bonded mates in the back of Helia’s Reach.
Flossie cannot mobilize that capacity in the next forty-eight hours.
There is one person in the Velarkis sector who can.
My claws are still out a quarter-inch. I tell them to retract. They do not.
I make the call anyway.
“Flossie.”
“Vosk. I have been waiting on you. Status.”
“Kesh is dead. Natalie killed him. Compound exposure on Natalie. Counteragent administered, working. We are extracting now.”
The voice I am using is the contract voice. Level. Certified. It is coming from a room in me that the rest of me is not in.
“Copy. The station?”
“Twenty sedated bonded mates in observation chambers. Multiple species. Including Korrhai matching Thane’s case profile. We do not have the capacity. I need an assist.”
A pause.
“Yes, lovey. I’ll call in Morrison.”
The big gun.
“Tell her it is a twenty-body mass recovery, BioSystems-tagged, cross-species, with medical assessment and chain-of-custody requirements your intake staff cannot cover in the first forty-eight hours. She and Luzrak have the network.”
“Copy, Vosk. I will comm her now. She is going to want a casualty manifest by 1800 and a chain-of-custody log signed by both you and Torres before the Junction extraction shuttle leaves dock. I will route the paperwork to your overlay.”
“Copy.”
“Vosk.”
“Flossie.”
“Take care of your mate.”
The line cuts.
One hundred and two.
I keep walking.
The ventral hatch. Helia’s Reach receives us at 1108 ship time.
I cycle the airlock. The cabin pressurizes. The scrubbed air of my ship hits Natalie’s lungs.
She breathes. One full breath of clean air. Ninety-nine.
“Nat.”
“Tael.”
“You are going to shower.”
“Tael, I do not have the energy to—”
“Sweetheart. His chemistry is on you. Not the manufactured compound — that is metabolizing inside you, the shot is handling it. His chemistry. His pair-signature. From the cradle of his hand at the back of your neck. From the proximity at peak saturation. It is on your skin and it is on your throat and it is the smell my biology is registering at every breath I take in this cabin.”
Her face when I say his is the face of a woman who has not been told about every aspect of what was done to her and who is learning one of them now.
“His chemistry is on me.”
“Yes.”
“Get it off me, Tael.”
“Copy.”
The shower cubicle is tactical-small.
One person at standard. Two if the two are compressed against each other in ways the engineer did not design for.
I get her tactical kit off at the cubicle door. Boots. Belt. Field jacket. The underlayer. The silk underneath the underlayer — bra, underwear, both bloodied at the side seam where the rib graze bled through. All of it set on the bench beside the cubicle.
I do not look.
I will not allow my body to read her body as mate while I am stripping her of clothing that has carried another male’s chemistry into my cabin.
She is naked at the cubicle door.
I get my kit off in the same thirty seconds.
I turn the water on. Hot. The setting Helia’s Reach runs for medical.
I get her under the water.
She makes a sound. Not a word. The sound a body makes when it has, in the last hour, been through four separate categories of wrong and is having hot water on its skin for the first time since the wrong began.
Then she moves.
She takes the soap out of the tray before I reach it. She scrubs the mate-mark spot at her own throat — hard, then harder, her nails involved, the skin going from wet-brown to a raw abraded red in four passes, her jaw locked, her eyes fixed on the drain like the drain is the case.
“Natalie.”
She does not stop. The fifth pass leaves a welt.
I catch her wrist. She fights it — one hard wrench of a trained arm — and I let the wrench spend itself against my grip so her wrist empties its force without getting free.
“You are taking skin off, sweetheart.”
“Then it will grow back clean.”
The sentence comes out of her in the report voice. Flat. Filed. It is the worst sentence I have ever heard her say.
Something in my chest makes a sound I did not authorize.
Not the purr. My hand around her wrist is shaking worse than her wrist is, and for the length of one breath the clinical register is not available to me — there is only a male in a wet cubicle holding the wrist of the woman who is trying to scrub herself off her own body.
She needs the register. She does not need the male.
I rebuild it. It costs more than the door did.
“Let me,” I say. “Nat. Let me. You cannot reach what needs reaching — you cannot smell it. I can. Let me get it off you, all of it, and then you will know it is gone, because I will know.”
A long three seconds. The water. Her wrist, pulling once more against my hand. Then her fingers open, the soap drops into my palm, and she stands with her throat bared to me and her fists closed at her sides like a soldier at an inspection she did not consent to.
“Tell me when,” she says. Flat. “I need to hear it gone.”
I put my hand under the water.
I wash her.
The mate-mark spot first. The bottom of her throat where Kesh’s hand cradled her neck. I soap my hands and I slide it, over the welt she made — the pressure of removing another male’s chemistry, not the pressure of touching my mate.
My biology wants.
My biology can want.
My biology will not get.
She makes another sound. Smaller. Her head bends forward. Her hair falls under the water, falls over my hand. I move my hand under the hair.
The side of her neck where Kesh was going to put his mouth. I clean it at the angle that gets everything off — hair, skin, the hollow at the collarbone.
Her shoulders.
Her upper back. Between her shoulder blades where I kissed her this morning, and which is now a place I am cleaning.
Last night I mapped her. Every inch, the way I said I would. Another male wrote over the map, and now I am washing my own work off my mate’s skin to get at what he left, and I will redraw every line of it when she asks me to.
She may never ask me to.
I wash her anyway.
She cries again. Quietly. The water on her face hides most of it.
My hand on her shoulder does not stop. I say nothing. I do not need to.
Her arms. Her hands. The blood at her ribs where the off-hand blade grazed. I am going to patch it once we are out.
Her ribs. Her stomach.
I do not go lower.
“Tael.”
“Sweetheart.”
“Lower.”
“Natalie.”
“Tael. Please. I need it off. He — he was going to—”
“I know.”
I wash her lower.
Clinical. Careful. Her hand on my shoulder. Her forehead against my collarbone. The water hot between us.
“There,” I say, against her hair. “It is gone, Natalie. All of it.”
Her fists, closed at her sides since she gave up the soap, come open.
I am shaking.
I clock the shaking of my hand at her hip.
Not her. Me. My body’s deferred response.
Not killing the male I served with because she did it first. Carrying my chemically violated mate two corridors.
Refusing the mark, she begged me for. Washing another male’s chemistry off her skin while my biology is screaming pair-bond response at the cabin.
The shaking is real.
She feels it.
Her hand at my jaw. She makes me look at her.
“Tael.”
“Nat.”
“I’ve got you too.”
I close my eyes.
I hold her against my chest for one minute under the hot water. Her arms around my ribs. Her face at my collarbone. The water. My biology being held by hers at a register I am not capable of running alone.
“Thank you, Nat.”
I dry her.
The towel in the galley. Soft. I wrap her in it, then in the thermal blanket from the bunk, then I carry her to the bunk and I lay her on it and I pull the blanket over her to her ribs.
The wound on her ribs.
I pull the med-kit. I patch it. My hands steady enough now, by the muscle memory of a tracker who has patched wounds in worse than this.
I pull on my kit. I sit at the edge of the bunk.
She turns toward me. Her hand on my chest. On my shirt where the rosette would be under it.
“Tael.”
“Sweetheart.”
“Thank you.”
“You do not have to thank me.”
“I do.”
A pause. Her thumb at the front of my shirt.
“Tael.”
“Mm.”
“How long do you have.”
“Eighteen months from pair-identification. Five days in.”
“Eighteen months minus five days.”
“Yes.”
She does not cry. She does not speak for thirty seconds. Her thumb at my shirt.
“You would have let me not know, and you would have died in your bunk in eighteen months, and you would not have told me?”
“Yes.”
The word costs more going out than the answer about how long did. She has the truth because she asked for it, and she would have gone the rest of her life without it because I decided she was better served not carrying it. Both of those are things I did. Only one of them was for her.
She presses her forehead against my chest. She holds there. Not moving. Not asking anything further.