19. In the Daylight #2
She holds me for the full ten. Her face at my shoulder. Her hand at the back of my head. She smells like her office — the tea she runs at every meeting, the lavender at the corner of her desk, the warmth she keeps running on purpose because the work runs on it.
She lets me go.
She turns to Tael.
“Tael.”
“Flossie.”
“Come here.”
He comes. He is more than a head taller than she is. She gets her arms around his ribs and hugs him in the way only Flossie Knight could hug a six-foot-five Draelith tracker who is not, by the natural state of his species, a male hugged by anyone.
He stands still for three.
Then his arms come around her.
She lets him go.
“Tea in my office in two hours. Both of you. After medical. Bring nothing operational. We are going to drink tea and you are going to tell me what your tracker did with that cocky face of his when he had to clean a wound. Then we will do the case. Yes?”
“Yes, Flossie.”
She nods once. The crack in the face seals.
She goes operational.
“Torek is awake. He is in medical. Maren has been with him for the last two hours. He is asking for the people who got him out.”
“Copy.”
“The geometric logo on the monitor in his chamber. I have routed it to specialist contacts at the corporate registry. I do not know whose logo it is. I have a feeling I am going to know shortly and I am not looking forward to whose.”
“Copy.”
“Drask has been pulled into the case on the Velarkis board file. The transaction code from my notebook matched something in the shell paperwork. His name is formally attached to your case as of this morning. The shell company has been seized. Severin BioSystems is the subject of a Velarkis board investigation that opened at 1430 station time. The corporate counsel for BioSystems in this sector has gone dark. I am not surprised.”
“Copy.”
“Morrison is at Iris-Nine with Luzrak running scene control. They have already cleared three chambers for transport. The first transport will be inbound to Junction One in approximately six hours. Twenty bonded mates. Luzrak is going to have his hands full.”
“Copy.”
“Torres.”
“Flossie.”
“Are you all right.”
I look at her.
The honest answer is no. The operational answer is yes. The answer that is going to make Flossie’s job easier in the next twenty-four hours is yes.
“I will be. I have been chemically exposed. I need a medical screen. Then I need to sleep for ten hours and to not be on the schedule for forty-eight hours after that.”
“Copy. Medical first. Vosk?”
“With her.”
“Copy. The screen room is in medical bay two. I have cleared it.”
She turns. She does not turn back.
The half-second she takes at the corner before she rounds it is, by my read of her shoulders, the half-second Flossie Knight takes when she has been holding the second of her three crises in the upper register of her brain and is allowed to let it down a notch.
She is glad I am back.
She does not have the bandwidth to say it.
We pass the medical bay.
The window onto Bay One is open. Through the window I see Maren first — her hair down, her clothes the same clothes she has been wearing for some indefinite number of days.
She is in the chair beside the bed.
Her hand is in his.
Torek is awake. Sedated still, by the slow blink of his eyes — he is going to be on the slow side of conscious for some hours yet.
But his hand is moving in hers. His fingers tightening, loosening, tightening again.
The small motion a Xarthian male makes with his bonded mate’s hand when his nervous system is, by the chemistry of pair-bonded contact, running the recovery protocol it has been engineered, by his species, to run.
Maren does not see us.
Her face is against his face. Her mouth at the side of his face, not kissing, just near.
I do not intrude.
Tael’s hand comes to the small of my back.
He does not pull me away. He does not push me forward. He stands at my shoulder and he lets me look for the count of some seconds I am not keeping.
Then —
“Nat.”
“I see them, Tael.”
“Mm.”
“They almost — they almost did not get this back.”
“I know.”
“Maren almost did not have her mate back.”
“I know, sweetheart.”
I do not finish the thought. He knows what the unfinished thought is. He hears it the way he has for five days been hearing the thoughts I do not finish.
His hand at the small of my back stays.
We move on.
The medical screening takes forty minutes.
The medic is Morcrestian. Female. Tusks at her lower jaw filed back to the polite length Junction One regulation requires for staff in patient-facing roles.
Her name is Dr. Vrek, and she is six-foot-two and broad at the shoulder in the way her species runs broad, and she has, by the small economy of her movements, been doing field medical assessments for some decades.
Her hands at my ribs are, by the contradiction my brain has to file every time a Morcrestian medic touches a patient, the most careful hands I have ever had on me in a medical setting.
She runs the pheromone-compound exposure protocol and the rib-graze documentation and the basic vital readings and the additional protocol she runs because the patient is in a configuration with a non-human male whose pair-identification status is, by the tag on my file Flossie has updated, Mate: priority.
She does not ask me about it.
She runs the protocol. She makes notes. She prints the report and signs it.
“You are clear of compound, Officer Torres. The counteragent worked. The reaction to it is resolved — your liver panel is clean, and the seizure left nothing behind. You are not going to develop any residual response. The chemistry in your body is your chemistry. Anything that happens from here is your own.”
“Thank you, Doctor.”
“The wound at the rib will close in five days under standard care. The abrasion at your throat is superficial — keep it clean and it will close in two. The compound exposure is going to leave you tired for some days. I am putting you on a forty-eight-hour rest, and I would advise no operational activities for a week.”
She does not ask how the abrasion got there. It is in the report anyway.
“Copy.”
“Officer.”
“Doctor.”
“Your partner was efficient with the patching. I have, in this office, seen worse field dressings done by full medics with kit. Whoever taught him paid attention.”
“He paid attention himself.”