22. Everyone Looks #3
My tail does not move until he clears ten meters past the corner. Then it tightens hard enough that Natalie feels it. I do not loosen it. I am not, in that second, a charming male eating noodles. I am a bonded male who just watched another male refuse his mate’s throat.
Natalie picks up her chopsticks. Looks at me.
“You went quiet.”
“I was eating.”
She watches my face. I watch her watch my face. Her dark eyes narrow a fraction.
“You don’t have to like him.”
“He’s a good deputy.”
“You said that with your entire chest.”
“He is a very good deputy, Natalie.”
She watches me for one more beat. The corner of her mouth twitches.
“You’re being weird.”
“I am, sweetheart, being charming.”
“You’re being weird and charming.”
“This is a feature.”
She lets it go. Goes back to her noodles. She will probably file this exchange under Tael being mildly territorial about my deputy, and she is, by what her face is doing, pleased about it.
I do not correct her.
I will not walk into her professional life and tell her the male she has trusted for three years smells wrong to me. Not based on one lunch and one lungful. Not without something to put on the table beside it.
She finishes. I pay. We walk out of the noodle stand together, my hand at the small of her back, spread low, the touch that tells the radial whose she is without making her do the work.
I walk my mate to her own door and leave her at her desk at 1347, and two corridors past her lift I open a private channel.
“JINX.”
“Tael.”
“Pull what you can on Ardent. Quietly. Shift assignments. Comms metadata. Off-duty movements. Last quarter.”
“Pulling.”
A pause.
“Tael.”
“Yes.”
“Do you want me to flag it to Sentry.”
“No.”
“Tael.”
“Quietly, JINX.”
“Quietly.”
I get back to SNAG at 1402 in the smug mood of a mated male who has just had lunch with his bonded mate and would like everyone in the room to know it.
The reinforced chair is still empty. I sit in it. Across the room Xor turns a page and does not look up, which is Xor for welcome back.
The intake queue chimes.
Three fresh cases. Flossie sends them across on the working channel without comment. Survey, Tael, lovey. Pick.
Case one. A Ferran salt merchant’s lost dowry shipment, intercepted in commercial space, low operator skill, recoverable within seventy-two hours. Boring. Below my rate. Take it for the easy paperwork and more time on Junction One. With my mate.
Case two. A missing junior diplomat, voluntary disappearance probable, family in denial, sensitive. Skip. That is somebody else’s case all day.
Case three. A research vessel logged data core, intercepted in unaffiliated space, professional-grade extraction.
Skip. Same hands as the case the human female on the intake calendar is, by the clock on Flossie’s desk, forty-five minutes from walking in here to brief us on, and my bonded mate has a Junction One operational priority that does not, on the record, accommodate me running an unaffiliated-space recovery for the next three weeks.
I send Flossie Case one.
She sends back: Of course, lovey.
I lean in the chair. Tail in the spiral. Coffee cooling at my elbow. A male between cases with forty-five minutes and nothing operational to spend them on.
The intake door cycles.
Thane.
He stops in the doorway because civilian doorways are not built for him, scans the room, and steps through.
No rifle. No field jacket. Just a dark gray Korrhai-cut shirt that cuts across teal-blue dermal plates and shoulders that have carried unconscious bonded males through breach corridors. His hands are empty. He reads rooms with his hands.
He has come from the medical bay. Antiseptic on his sleeve at three meters.
He has been to see Torek. Twice since yesterday. Thane carries the people he carries, files them, closes the file. Torek is, by some part of him none of us are going to ask about, not closed.
He stops at the center of the room.
“Florence.”
“Lovey. Sit down.”
He takes the second reinforced chair. The reinforcement order is fresh. Petra filed it after deciding, on no available evidence, that Thane was going to stay. She has been smug about that one since the order cleared and she has, so far, been saving the smugness.
She is today going to spend it.
Flossie sets her pen down.
“Thane.”
“Florence.”
“You came back to Junction One after Iris-Nine without a contract obligating it.”
“Yes, Florence.”
“You have been to the medical bay twice since yesterday.”
“Yes, Florence.”
“Sign the contract, lovey.”
He signs without reading.
Flossie picks her tea up.
“Welcome to SNAG, lovey.”
“Thank you, Florence.”
“Petra is going to want to make you a tea.”
“I am prepared for that.”
Petra is already on her feet with the kettle.
Flossie, warmer: “And lovey. I want you to know how this office runs. We are a small team. We do not have a chain of command. We have a crew. Xor reads tactics. I read intake. Tael reads bodies. You read what your work tells you to read. Nobody on this floor is going to ask you to file something through a junior officer because nobody on this floor is a junior officer. We are operators. We make our calls in the room.”
Thane nods, slow.
“Understood, Florence.”
His head turns. His golden eyes find me.
“Vosk.”
“Thane.”
“You took the contract.”
“Signed without reading.”
“Copy.”
A beat.
His gold eyes go to the spot at my throat where Natalie’s mark is.
Everyone looks.
“It suits you.”
“Mm.”
“It also explains why you came back into this office looking like the most insufferable male in the sector.”
“That predates the bond, Thane.”
“Tell your mate I owe her a thank-you, when she next has the time.”
“Copy.”
He returns to his teacup.
Petra brings the tea over and slides it onto the arm of his chair. She pats his shoulder once. Brief. The pat a younger sister gives a six-foot-eight older brother who has just walked through the door for the holidays. The corner of his mouth moves the smallest distance Korrhai mouths move.
Petra goes back to her desk. On the way past mine, her foot, without breaking stride, without looking down, with no visible commitment to the gesture, gives the leg of my reinforced chair a small kick.
The kick is the kick a younger sister gives an older brother’s furniture for having kicked it.
My tail uncoils a quarter inch toward nothing in particular.
I file the uncoil as involuntary.
Petra, behind me, sits at her desk. Maurice resettles. Petra says, mostly to Maurice and not at all to me:
“Maurice approves.”
Maurice does not, of course, react.
Across the office, the corner of Thane’s mouth moves another quarter inch.
JINX, on the public channel, with a tone about to be insufferable on his own behalf: “brICK?”
A click on the office speaker. New register, heavier than SPROUT’s, slower, calibrated for the Korrhai chest cavity.
“JINX.”
“Welcome to the family.”
SPROUT, dry: “We are not, JINX, a family. We are an inter-system coordination architecture.”
“SPROUT?”
“JINX.”
“Are we are a family?”
A pause.
SPROUT: “FINE JINX, we are a family. Stop hogging the bandwith.”
1447. The intake door cycles.
Petra is up before the second chime, across the office in four strides, hand on the panel. Petra runs a door the way Petra runs everything, which is by treating every arrival as a personal joke between herself and the universe, and the universe is, on most days, a willing participant.
She opens the door.
Pause.
“Oh. You.”
A small female voice on the other side: “Yes. Me.”
“You came back.”
“It’s day four. We agreed if I made day five you’d shoot me.”
“That’s still on the table.”
A snort.
A small one. Quiet. The kind someone tries to absorb back into her own ribcage before anyone hears it.
Petra grins. “Get in here. Flossie’s expecting you.”
The female who walks through is mid-thirties, of average height, honey-blonde hair losing the war with a ponytail that gave up before lunch. Practical jacket. Boots that have been somewhere muddy.
She steps into the office.
She clocks Thane.
She clocks Thane the way everyone clocks Thane on first meeting: head tilts up by an extra degree, shoulders square as the nervous system runs the inventory of six-eight, teal-blue, dermal plates, hands the size of plates.
Her policy, it seems, is a competent professional female who will not be pushed around by a six-eight Korrhai today.
Thane, in the chair, has gone still.
The teacup in his hand, mid-rotation, stops at four o’clock.
I lift my coffee to my mouth slowly to give my face something to do.
The female crosses the office, sits in the chair Petra waves her toward, takes the tea Petra puts in her hand, and does not, on any external register, react to the fact that the largest male in the room has stopped moving.
Petra, behind her, slides a second cushion behind her back at the lower spine without comment. The female, for half a second, registers the cushion. Petra has, by the quiet economy of her hand, given the cushion the way a woman gives a cushion when she has, herself, once needed one.
Then she sets the tea on Flossie’s desk, and her hands come into the light.
Her fingertips are blue.
Not Korrhai blue. Ink blue. The blue of a human female who has been writing with a fountain pen in the last hour and has not, in the time since, washed.
Flossie has the brown notebook. The female has, just now withdrawn a brown notebook from her side pocket with fingers stained the color of writing by hand. Two notebooks. Two pens. One office. One Korrhai male whose teacup has stopped at four o’clock.
When does the betting pool open?
“I’m Charlie Park.”
“Flossie Knight, lovey. Tea. Sit. Tell me what you lost.”
Charlie sits and tells us.
Six months of investigative work into a corporate front company. A shell for something she had not, at the time of the intercept, finished researching. Names. Transaction codes. Supply-chain mapping. Photographs. Something criminal.
Eleven days ago. Mid-transit between two relay stations through unaffiliated space. Three operators. Cargo-bay grab. Professional. They knew the route, the cargo, and her.
A pause.