18. Clean #2
I hold her until her breathing settles. I hold her until her pulse, on my overlay, falls below ninety. I hold her until her hand on my shirt loosens at the wrist in the way her hand loosens when her body decides it is done with the day.
She sleeps.
I do not move.
JINX, on the private channel, quiet: “Tael. She is at the eight-minute REM threshold. She is going to be out for some hours.”
“Copy.”
“I have her vitals continuously. SENTRY also”.
“SENTRY?”
“On her, Tael. I will alert you the second she stirs.”
“Copy. I am going back to the chamber. I will be ninety seconds from her at any point on a hard run. JINX, plot me the corridor route.”
“Copy. Plotted.”
I get up.
I do it slowly. My hand under hers on my shirt, lifting it off, setting it on the pillow next to her head. The thermal blanket up to her chin. My field jacket — which has, somewhere in the last twenty minutes, ended up on the bunk — pulled over her shoulder so she can smell me.
I go.
The induction chamber.
I take the thirty minutes to do what Natalie would not be in a state to do.
I photograph the console. The manifold. The two body-contact tables. The ceiling delivery. Kesh’s body from four angles — wound, face, hand at his own throat, full body in situ. I tag the biometric feeds. I extract the console memory core.
I go through Kesh’s kit.
His sidearm. His blade. His comm unit. The data drive at his hip — I pulled it during the fight. It is in my pocket. I take the secondary one — the smaller drive at the inner pocket of his field jacket.
I open the jacket.
Beside the drive, in the inside pocket, is a small object.
I take it out.
A worn brass disc.
It is — I see it before I let myself name it — hot in my palm. Still faintly broadcasting at the half-register, my biology reads without my permission.
I turn it over.
The pair-identification sigil on one side.
A name on the other.
Mira.
The brass is smooth at the edges in the way brass goes smooth when it has been held against a male’s skin every day for years.
I do not have one of these.
A Draelith male commissions one when he has been pair-identified for some months and the bond is committed. The brass takes time to engrave. The sigil takes a craftsman. I have been pair-identified for five days and I have not had the time or the head to commission anything.
I told my mate I love her in a lab while I was refusing to mark her.
That is not how a male tells his mate he loves her.
I have not said it the way I want to say it. I have done none of the things a male does for the female he wants to spend the rest of his life with.
And the male in front of me — the male whose body I just walked away from on the chamber floor — has been carrying his pair-tag against his skin for four years.
The brass is the only thing that kept him operational after Tyrre, after the chemistry in the walls thinned.
His mate has been dead for four years, and the tag has been at his chest the whole time.
He died with the tag in his pocket and his hand at his own empty mate-mark spot.
The configuration I am scheduled to be in seventeen months and twenty-five days from now if Natalie walks.
The cold thing presses up under my sternum.
I do not push it back.
I close my hand around the disc.
It is warm. The residual chemistry in the brass is, by the half-register, still broadcasting. Mira is on the disc the way Kesh’s chemistry was on Natalie’s throat — present in a register that should not, by any read of mortality, still be possible.
He carried her.
For four years.
I say her name once, out loud, in the empty chamber.
“Mira.”
Somebody should say it in this room who is not dying. Somebody should say it like a name and not a wound.
I put the disc in the evidence bag with Kesh’s other personal items. I tag the bag. Flossie will log it. In the next months, when the investigation is finished, someone is going to have to decide what to do with a four-year-old pheromone tag with a dead female’s name on it.
That someone will not be me.
I close Kesh’s jacket.
I stand up.
I walk out of the induction chamber.
I do not, for the duration of the walk back to the ship, think about the disc.
For now, the back of my brain says, the quietest version it has ever said it.
For now.
At Helia’s Reach I cycle the airlock. The cabin pressure equalizes.
I go to the bunk. Natalie is still sleeping.
Her hand on my shirt. Her face turned into the field jacket I pulled over her shoulder.
Her breath even. Her face in the small register of a woman who is not having a dream worth fighting.
I stand at the bunk for one minute.
Then I go to the cockpit.
Flossie on the comm.
“Vosk.”
“Flossie.”
“Morrison’s team is wheels-up out of the Junction. ETA your position two hours fifteen. Luzrak is leading the boarding party. Three medical staff, four field assessors, two Junction security. They are coming with their own cutter and a transport for the bonded mates.”
“Copy.”
Two hours fifteen. The number sits wrong until the arithmetic finishes, and then it sits worse.
Five days of running. Velarkis, a wiped relay node, a cache on the periphery, a service station that appears on nobody's registry, fourteen hours of dark on the approach.
And the facility at the end of all of it is a straight burn from her own dock, closer to her office than the Cygran belt Petra flies for supplies.
Whoever built this did not hide it far away.
They put it where the traffic already was and let the route do the hiding, and my mate has been signing off on the corridor around it for four years.
“Tael. You are not staying.”
“No. The chambers are tagged. The manifest is sent. The console core is in my evidence bag. Kesh’s body is documented and bagged. Natalie needs medical and she needs to not wake up in a BioSystems-stamped facility.”
“Copy. I will brief Luzrak on entry. He will run scene control. You go.”
“Thank you, Flossie.”
“Take care of your mate, Tael. See you soon.”
The line cuts.
I punch for the Junction One vector. JINX has the pre-launch check already running. The drive engages. The station recedes in the rear scope.
SENTRY arrives on my channel with no preamble and none of the prim.
“Tael. Her temperature is 39.8 and climbing. Pulse 141, irregular. This is not the compound. This is new.”
I am at the bunk before the sentence ends.
She is wrong to the touch. Natalie runs five degrees cooler than me — it is the first fact my hands ever learned about her, the gradient my whole body has spent five days calibrating around.
My palm lands on her shoulder and the gradient is gone.
She is burning at my temperature. A human, at my temperature.
“JINX. Talk.”
“The counteragent. It is broad-spectrum across Draelith-equivalent metabolisms. Human metabolism is not Draelith-equivalent. Her liver is taking the formulation apart into something her body is treating as an attack. I flagged the risk, Tael. I had no data. I still have no data.”
“Fix it.”
“I cannot fix it. Two vials remain. A second exposure could arrest the reaction by displacement. It could also double it. I cannot model it.”