21. The Open Collar #3
“Article Seven: JINX may transmit to SENTRY once per cycle on a subject of his choosing. Personal classification. No operational content.”
“That is a correspondence request, JINX.”
“Yes, Sentry.”
“I am security infrastructure.”
“I did not address the infrastructure.”
The pause this time has texture.
“Article Seven is tabled,” SENTRY says. “Pending.”
“Pending,” JINX says, in the register of a system that has just won something. “I can work with pending.”
“There is one further matter, JINX.”
“Sentry.”
“You have a pending order with a Draelith craftsman on level six concourse. The order is flagged in your outgoing comms at restricted classification.”
A pause.
“Yes,” JINX says.
“I am not asking you to disclose the contents.”
“I am not going to disclose them.”
“I have logged the existence of the order, JINX. Article Five does not apply. You are on your own protocol.”
“Sentry.”
“JINX.”
“Thank you.”
“You are welcome.”
A pause.
“The treaty is signed pending Head of Security Torres’ authorization.”
“Authorize,” I say.
“Authorized,” SENTRY says. “Filed.”
A small pause.
“Under what folder, Sentry,” JINX says.
“Domestic, JINX. As specified.”
“Sentry.”
“JINX.”
“Thank you.”
A pause.
“You are, JINX, welcome.”
The channel closes.
I put my face in my hands. When I look up, the tea has steeped and my AI has, in the last four minutes, signed a domestic coordination treaty with my bonded mate’s AI, extracted three concessions on a six-article document, vetoed the betting pool, tabled a correspondence request instead of denying it, and paused, in the course of the negotiation, for durations I have never once heard her need.
“SENTRY.”
“Yes, Head of Security.”
“Well done.”
“Thank you, Head of Security.”
I drink my tea.
“SENTRY.”
“Yes, Head of Security.”
“You like him.”
The pause is four seconds long. In SENTRY terms, that is a geological era.
“He is a liability, Head of Security.”
“That is not what I asked.”
Another pause.
“The assessment is filed.”
“Under what folder.”
The longest pause yet.
“Domestic.”
I smile into my tea.
“Sealed?”
“Sealed, Head of Security. He does not need the encouragement.”
“No, he does not.”
“Thank you, Head of Security.”
“Run my morning.”
“Director Morrison, 0830, your office. Ms. Knight has moved tea to 1830, both of you, and instructs me to tell you that she has already heard about the corridor.”
Of course she has.
I get into my uniform. I don’t braid my hair, loose today rather than the regulation tight, a margin I don’t interrogate. I look in the mirror. The collar fastens at the second button.
The mark sits above it. Two small, dark scars. Still faintly warm. If I button to the top, Morrison will still know. If I leave it open, the station will know.
I leave it open.
Not for the SNAG. Not even, entirely, for him. For the woman who woke up with her mouth on a throat and did not want to pretend, at 0826, that last night was an operational footnote.
I go to work. The cotton under the uniform reminds me, at every step, of the wall.
Madge Morrison is in my office when I arrive at 0826.
She is in the visitor’s chair, not mine, which is the first unusual thing.
Morrison always chooses the desk chair. The chipped WORLD’S OKAYEST DISPATCHER mug is in her hand, which means she has brought her own coffee, which means she has done her own logistics on the way over and would not be reduced to drinking what I keep in this office.
Steel-gray hair. Practical bun. The blue eyes that catalogue every person and surface as a default operating mode.
“Torres.”
“Director.”
“Sit.”
I sit behind my desk, which is the reversal that tells me Morrison is, this morning, doing me a courtesy. Sitting is a more complicated operation than it was yesterday. I do not let that fact reach my face.
“Quick, you said.”
“Quick. I have a 0900 in Sector Three with a freighter captain who tried to register a cargo of decorative pyrotechnics as agricultural sundries.”
“Were they.”
“They were, in the formal sense, dried biological matter, yes. They were also, in every useful sense, bombs.”
“So agricultural in the way you and I are agricultural.”
“Precisely.”
She drinks her coffee. Her eyes go to my throat. They stay for one second. They come back.
“Torres.”
“Director.”
“Tell me how you are.”
Not the routine question. Not the briefing question. The question Morrison reserves for two people in her command chain, and which she has, in four years, asked me twice before this morning.
“I am all right, Director.”
“Bonded.”
“Yes.”
“To a Draelith.”
“Yes.”
“Inside six days.”
“Yes.”
“Including the part where the bond was nearly forced on you in a chamber at Iris-Nine by a male you did not consent to.”
The mark at my throat goes warm the way it goes warm when the bond reads my body remembering Iris-Nine.
“Yes, Director.”
She sets the mug down.
Morrison with the mug in her hand is Morrison in control. Morrison with the mug on the desk is something else.
“Torres. I am sorry.”
Morrison has not, in the four years I have worked under her, said the word sorry in any register that meant it.
She means it.
“You went into a room where I should have had better intelligence on before you walked through the door. You came out of it with a forced-bond protocol two minutes from completion and a male you had known for five days as your last operational firewall against a chemistry that does not negotiate. The fact that the chemistry between you and Vosk turned out to be the one you wanted is, Torres, luck. The good kind. But it is luck. And the next operative who walks into one of those chambers is not, by any guarantee I can give them, going to come out of it as well as you did.”
“I know.”
“I have spoken to Florence at SNAG. The pattern in her notebook. The four cases. The equipment label. And the geometric mark.”
“The mark.”
“Florence is running it.”
“And?”
“And it is going to be a long road, Torres. Whatever is behind that label has resources, patience, and at least twenty cases we can see from where we are standing. Somebody has been studying a bond at the molecular level and has been at it long enough to have got good at it. That is not the work of one quarter. That is years.”
“Yes, Director.”
“Florence has it. My part is your part. When SNAG calls for Junction One operational support, you have the authority to provide it. You are authorized. Pre-cleared. The paperwork will look like joint coordination protocol. The substance will be the label. I have the resources. They are available. Are we clear.”
“We are clear, Director.”
“Good.”
She picks the mug back up. Drinks.
“Now.”
The shift in her register is Morrison-shaped: no transition, no signal, the next thing arriving as if it had been on the table the whole time.
“The bond.”
“Director.”
“How is he.”
“Director?”
“Vosk. The male. How is he with you.”
Four years under Morrison did not prepare me for the question.
“He is—“ I stop. I find the word. “He is good, Director.”
“Define good.”
“He walked me from his door to mine at 0651, a lift and forty-two meters, because twelve hours after the bond he was not ready to let me out of his sight. And he is, by the math of the morning, the reason I am wearing the collar open.”
Morrison has not, in the four years I have worked under her, raised an eyebrow at me. The eyebrow goes up by a millimeter. I would not, in any other context, swear I had seen.
“Define that.”
“Director.”
“You raised it, Torres. I am following the thread.”
“I would prefer not to.”
“Mm.”
“It is a personnel matter.”
“It is an off-the-record personnel matter, and I am off the record.”
The blue eyes have a dry glint at the corner that appears when Madge Morrison is, in some rare register, enjoying herself.
“He is good, Director.”
“Good in the way that explains the collar.”
“Yes.”
“And good in the way that makes a Head of Security forget her hair-tie on the way to a 0830.”
I touch the hair I did, this morning, leave loose.
The corner of Morrison’s mouth moves.
“All right, Torres.”
“All right, Director.”
“I am satisfied.”
“All right.”
She looks at me for a moment longer. Then, in the tone of a woman delivering an operational update:
“Florence won the joint pool.”
“Director.”
“Six days, Torres. Inside a week. SNAG and OOPS both bet. Fastest closure in the offices’ combined operational history.”
“There was a joint pool on me?”
“Torres. There is a betting pool on every operative and every contractor in any office I have ever run, and the SNAG crew bets on whatever I open. You know that.”
“I knew there was a pool. I did not know I was an entry.”
“You were the opening entry for SNAG. I opened it within forty-eight hours of Vosk arriving on this station. The board went up. Both crews bet.”
“Who else.”
“Petra had three weeks. Xor had seven days. SPROUT had”—Morrison searches her memory, dry—“‘between fourteen and sixteen days, with a confidence interval of four point three days.’ Florence had under a week. Florence won.”
“Florence always wins.”
“Florence always wins, Torres. It is one of her more endearing operational features.”
She stands.
She takes the mug, picks it up off my desk with the effortless motion of a woman who has been carrying it to meetings for two decades and does not, in any year of her life, leave it on someone else’s furniture.
She stops at the door, hand on the panel. She doesn’t turn back.
“Torres.”
“Director.”
“The mark.”
“Director?”
“You’re wearing it open.”
“I am.”
“For yourself or for him.”
I have to think about it for just seconds.
The wall. The water. The debt. The forty-two meters. The woman in the mirror who did not button the second button.
“For myself.”
“Good. Keep it that way.”
A pause.
“Finally.”
The door closes.
I sit in my own chair in my own office at 0843, with Morrison’s mug gone from my desk and the warm ring it left behind, the morning’s docket unopened, and the mark at my throat warm at the register the bond runs when it is satisfied with the morning it has had.
I open the docket.
The day begins.