Epilogue Three Months Later
Tael
She does not look up.
I clock the kasa. I clock the pen. I clock she has not looked up. She knows I am here but she is making me wait. I lean my shoulder at the bulkhead.
“Sweetheart.”
“Vosk.”
“Are we leaving the office at the appointed hour, or are we performing the ritual where I stand in the doorway for minutes before you acknowledge my existence?”
“The latter.”
“Mm.”
“Two more reports.”
I do not move from the bulkhead. In the inside pocket of my field jacket, against my chest are two discs.
A matched pair.
The first is hers. The second is mine.
Master Velran finished the pair in the first week of the commission.
By the Draelith protocol, the bonded pair-tag is always a matched pair: the male’s disc and the female’s disc, brass to brass, name to name, the inversion of one at the back of the other.
The male commissions both. The male offers both.
The male gives the female her disc, and the female, by the protocol some hundreds of years older than my grandfather, gives the male his.
Or does not.
The protocol does not require her to.
The protocol allows her to refuse.
The discs in my pocket have been in my pocket for some weeks now, while I have decided three separate times it was going to be the night and decided three separate times to wait.
Tonight I have walked from the level six concourse to her office at level three with the weight of two brass discs against my sternum and the small Draelith certainty in my body that the female across the desk is, in the next some hours, going to give me an answer, and that the answer is going to be the answer I have been hoping for.
Or not.
There are also, by my commission, two things on her disc Master Velran will not, in the formal documentation of the pair, list.
The first is on the back. By protocol the discs cross; each wears the other’s name in the formal old Draelith script.
Hers has mine. Taelveth. Below the name, in the same old script, in the small hand only Velran’s bench produces, three more characters that translate, in the dead Draelith I learned from my grandfather and that ninety-nine of every hundred Draelith males will read as a flourish on the engraver’s signature, into the phrase I have you.
The phrase I have, in three months, said into her hair at the airlock and her sternum in this bed and the back of her neck at the cockpit of Helia’s Reach on the way to Iris-Nine.
The phrase she has, on every one of those occasions, lost the next breath at.
The phrase is now on the back of the disc she is going to wear at her throat for the rest of her bonded life.
She is going to find out at her own pace, when she takes the disc off some evening in this bed and turns it over and reads the script on the back the way she reads everything: slowly, twice, the small Natalie crease at her brow, the moment her dark eyes catch the meaning and lift to mine.
I am going to be lying in our bed when she does.
I am going to be wearing my half of the matched pair and the half-grin at the corner of my mouth, and I am going to spend the next hours of my bonded life paying for the inscription at exactly the rate the Head of Security on this station charges for that kind of arrogance.
I am looking forward to it.
The second is at the back of the brass itself, sealed under the engraving.
Master Velran’s bench builds one, exactly one, micro-cavity into a custom-commissioned bonded pair-tag at the request of the commissioning male, on the small Draelith protocol of enhanced personalization.
Most males who ask for it use the cavity for a strand of their hair, a flake of their dermal pigment, a drop of their blood: the small biological tokens a Draelith male of the older generations leaves at the back of the brass for the bonded female to carry against her bonded skin for the rest of her life.
I asked for the reservoir.
The reservoir is a sealed cavity at the back of her disc, six millimeters across, calibrated by Master Velran’s hands to release a controlled concentration of my bonded pheromone signature at her body warm.
The release runs continuously, low, at the bonded register every Draelith male’s nose can read at three meters.
The reservoir spikes, by Velran’s calibration, when her pulse climbs above one hundred.
He triple-checked it at my request; the corner of his mouth twitched at the third check, and he did not, by his own bench protocol, comment.
Anger. Stress. Operational pressure. Arousal.
Anything that runs her body at the rate the bonded pheromone reservoir is calibrated to spike at.
The result is that any male of any species with a functional olfactory who comes within three meters of her, at any moment her pulse is above one hundred, is going to register her as bonded to Tael Vosk and currently being attended to by him whether I am in the room.
She does not know.
She is going to find out at the noodle stand on the sixth level concourse the next time her pulse spikes in public for any reason.
Inspector Luzrak takes lunch at that stand on Tuesdays.
The Kytherian olfactory runs at the bonded pheromone register the way a Draelith does.
Inspector Luzrak is going to clock the spike at the count of two seconds.
He is going to look at her. She is going to clock the look.
Inspector Luzrak is going to go back to his noodles and finish the meal at the protocol of a Kytherian senior officer who has just been informed of a thing he was not looking to be informed about.
She is going to come home that evening, ready to kill me.
I am going to deserve it.
I am going to enjoy every second.
And when she is done killing me, I am going to tell her the rest of it: that Velran can neutralize the reservoir in one visit, on her word, no questions. The protocol that lets her refuse the disc lets her refuse any part of what is in it. It is her throat. It stays her call.
I am betting my span she keeps it.
The reservoir, by Velran’s bench guarantee, is calibrated to last the rest of my Draelith span.
She finishes the second report. Signs it. Closes the terminal. Sets the pen down at the exact angle her pen has, in the four years she has run security on Junction One, sat at the corner of her desk at the end of shift.
She stands.
She crosses the office.
She stops at the doorway. Two inches between us. Her dark eyes find mine.
“Vosk.”
“Sweetheart.”
“You took the long route.”
“I did.”
“From level six concourse.”
“Yes.”
“You have, on most evenings of the last three months, taken the lift from level five.”
“I had an errand.”
“At the level six concourse?”
“At the level six concourse, sweetheart.”
She does not ask what the errand was.
Her eyes are on mine. She is going to make me wait.
I am going to enjoy the wait.
“Walk me home, Vosk.”
“Yes, sweetheart.”
The corridor between her office and the lift is forty-eight meters at 1903 with the level three corridor at evening-shift quiet.
My hand at the small of her back. My tail at her wrist. Her stride at the half-pace I have calibrated to the half-pace a bonded female sets when she is, this evening, in no particular hurry.
She is in no particular hurry.
Neither am I.
“Tael.”
“Mm.”
“You are smirking.”
“I am not smirking.”
“You are smirking through the purr.”
“The purr is at the standard register.”
“The purr is at the register the purr runs at when you are smirking, Vosk. I have learned to read it.”
“Noted, sweetheart.”
She tilts her head. The mark at her throat catches the corridor light. The brass disc against my chest warms by another increment.
“Vosk.”
“Sweetheart.”
“Whatever you are about to do, do it inside my quarters.”
“Yes, sweetheart.”
The lift opens. We get in.
In the lift I put my mouth at her temple and do not kiss her.
I breathe her. Nine hours of station and tea and the warm under the open collar.
My tail tightens on her wrist. She leans into my chest like the lift is not public.
It is public enough. I do not put my hand between her legs. I think about it the entire way up.
Her quarters are, in three months, no longer her quarters.
The print of her mother’s garden is at the same angle on the counter.
The kettle is at the same place. The personal terminal is on standby.
But the field jacket on the chair at the door is mine.
The boots beside hers are mine. The second mug at the kitchen alcove is mine.
The book at her bedside, the one she reads when she is not, by the half-set of her body at the register of off-shift, operational, is the one I gave her.
The room was ours within three months. I have not said it. Neither has she. But we don’t need to.
She turns at the door.
“Vosk?”
“Sweetheart.”
“Take off the jacket.”
I take off my jacket.
The brass discs in the inside pocket move with the jacket and settle on the chair at the door. The discs can wait. The female in front of me cannot.
Her hand at my collar. Her eyes on mine.
The mark at her throat at the warm. The pulse-sync running at our shared baseline, eighty-four, and climbing as her hand slides under the collar and finds the mark at my throat and her thumb runs the slow circle she runs when she is informing me that the time for the smirk has ended.
I let the smirk stay one count longer.
Then I lose it.
Her mouth at mine. Open. Hungry. Nine hours of being the architecture, spent. I kiss her back like I have been thinking about her mouth since 1100. I have. I take her hands off my collar. I put them on my chest. I walk her backwards to the bed.
“Tael.”
“Sweetheart.”
“You are doing the thing.”
“What thing?”
“The walking-me-backwards thing. The thing the male does when he has decided the female is, in the next sixty seconds, going to be on the bed.”
“Yes, sweetheart.”
In thirty seconds she is on the bed.
The uniform comes off her.