Page 11 of Fought and Found

“Your shield harmonics.” He taps the screen again. Proprietary. Condescending. As if this is his vessel and I am the intruder who needs correcting. “The oscillation frequency is 3.2% below the optimal threshold for a vessel of this class. Your navigational array is cluttered with personal effects, your power allocation is sentimental at best, and your entire defensive posture is —”

“Kept us alive.”

He stops.

“My shield harmonics kept us alive for the last six minutes, pet. Yours are currently floating in three pieces.”

The silence that follows is deeply, thoroughly satisfying. His jaw locks. The claw hovering over my screen retracts — slowly, carefully, the way you withdraw a hand from a surface when you’ve been caught touching something you shouldn’t. His tail, locked against his calf, gives one hard twitch that he kills immediately.

“Also,” I say, because I’m already winning and there’s no reason to stop, “the power allocation you’re calling sentimental? That’s a Morrison dual-loop. It routes surplus from non-essential systems to shields during combat and back to life support after. She designed it. I installed it. It’s the reason Sprout could run tactical and maintain atmosphere at the same time while your ship was busy becoming debris.” I lean against the corridor wall. “But please. Do go on about the fairy lights.”

His jaw flexes. The muscle shifts beneath the crimson skin, beneath the dark edge of a marking that runs along the line of it, and I watch the effort it takes him not to respond to my ship, my systems, and my tactical record having just dismantled his professional assessment in four sentences. The discipline is impressive, grudgingly. The arrogance sitting underneath it, the absolute certainty that he knows better despite standing shipless in my corridor, is the kind of breathtaking that has nothing to do with attraction and everything to do with wanting to hit him with a data pad.

“I have logged that under ‘conversations where the Xarthian loses,’” Sprout says from somewhere near the ceiling, orb pulsing a warm, smug green.

“The situation has changed,” he says, turning from the console. Tactical voice. The one from the cockpit, flat and impersonal, though I notice he doesn’t resume criticising my nav systems. “We have a mutual problem. Those mercenaries were not SRS-contracted.”

“I know.”

“Their targeting priority was the cargo, not either of us specifically.”

“I know that too.”

“Which means a third party is aware of the container’s location, its transit route, and its current custody status.” He pauses. Gold eyes on me. The amber is deeper than it was in the cockpit — warmer at the edges, the slit pupils fractionally wider, and I’m filing this under combat adrenaline because the alternative is that his eyes change color when he’s interested and I am not going to be the woman who notices that. “You need tactical support. I need a functional vessel. I propose a temporary alliance.”

“You propose.” I lean against the corridor wall, arms still folded, Betsy warm in the holster against my hip. “You’re proposing an alliance. On my ship. The ship you boarded without permission forty minutes ago. The ship whose shield harmonics just saved your life. The ship you called an ‘aesthetic catastrophe.’”

“I did not say that aloud.”

“You said it with your face, lovey. Loudly.”

His jaw does something complicated. His tail, locked rigid against his calf, gives a single involuntary twitch — toward me, definitely toward me, the last six inches angling left before he kills it — and his nostrils flare on a breath he didn’t mean to take. Something about the way I said lovey. Or the way I’m leaning. Or the way my braid is falling apart and I haven’t fixed it and he keeps not looking at it with enormous effort.

“Acceptable,” he says. The word sounds like it costs him a filling.

“Lovely.” I smile. Full wattage. The one Morrison calls a health hazard. “Tea?”

“You fight well,” he says, instead of answering. The gold eyes hold mine. Steady, evaluative, carrying the full weight of nine years of Tier 1 operations and whatever filing system he uses to rank the galaxy’s threats. “For a courier.”

The condescension is layered so thick I could spread it on toast. For a courier. As if the twelve years and the Morrison training and the three interplanetary conflicts are a quaint little hobby that happen to include marksmanship. He delivers it without a flicker of irony, standing shipless in my corridor, alive because of my shield harmonics and my aim, and the sheer arrogance of it is so towering it’s almost beautiful.

Almost. He hasn’t earned beautiful.

“You hold back,” I say. “For a monster.”

I don’t mean it. I know that the second it leaves my mouth — the word is wrong, shaped wrong, aimed wrong. But I don’t take it back, because taking it back would mean acknowledging what I meant by it, and I don’t know what I meant. Only that I watched him move to shield me from those mercs before his brain caught up with his body. Tail first. Claws second. Thought third. That kind of reflex doesn’t come from a monster. That kind of reflex comes from something the word monster was built to cover up.

He doesn’t flinch.

That’s the thing. He doesn’t flinch, doesn’t blink, doesn’t give me the satisfaction of a reaction. His face stays exactly where it was — composed, dismissive, gold eyes flat — and the absence of response tells me more than flinching would have. The word is old for him.Worn smooth from use, the way a stone gets smooth in a riverbed. Whatever sharp edge it used to carry, it landed on scar tissue long ago.

Something climbs my throat and it’s not words. Not yet. It’s the feeling I get when I write in the notebook — when I find a pattern nobody’s tracking, a loss nobody filed, a person-shaped gap in a system that was designed not to notice. The feeling with teeth. The one Morrison calls crusader in a tone that isn’t entirely a compliment.

My hand goes to my sternum before I can stop it. Pressing flat against the bone through the cardigan, through the tactical vest underneath. Not because of him. Because of whatever machine takes a child and makes him into this — seven feet of discipline and contempt and a tail that reaches for people against orders — and then hands him the word monster like it’s a name he should answer to. The anger sits behind my ribs like a coal, formless, too hot to hold.

I drop my hand.

“He has been called that before.” Sprout’s voice is quiet. Not sharp, not tactical, not smug. The orb has drifted down from the ceiling to hover near my shoulder, glowing a muted gold-green. “Many times. By people who meant it.” A pause. “You did not mean it.”