Page 19 of Fought and Found

“I would prefer you use your off switch.”

“I do not have an off switch. This was a design choice I made deliberately.” The orb bobs once, smug. “The Xarthian is awake, by the way. He has been sitting on the cargo bunk staring at the wall for fourteen minutes. His thermal output is elevated, and his tail is wrapped around his own leg. I mention this for tactical purposes.”

I should not find this information useful. I find this information devastatingly useful. I add it to the growing file of things I’m not examining tonight and pull up the route calculations.

The dust belt is four hours away. Gerald’s gap is holding steady. The merc formation hasn’t shifted. Everything is fine. Everything is on track. I am a professional courier with twelve years of experience and a Morrison dual-loop shield system and there is absolutely no reason for me to be thinking about the way his voice broke on the word don’t.

Don’t. Do not say things like that unless —

Unless what? He didn’t finish the sentence. Walked away instead, claws driving into his own palms, and I saw the blood. Thin dark lines of crimson against crimson, barely visible, but I see things other people miss. That’s what I do. That’s what the notebook is for. And now the notebook has a new entry I haven’t written yet, sitting in my sternum like a splinter: a man who bleeds when someone calls him beautiful,because no one ever has, and the word reached something so deep it came out the other side as pain.

The cargo bunk door opens.

He fills the corridor the way he fills every space on this ship — too broad, too tall, too much of him for a vessel built on a human scale. His tactical suit is torn at the shoulder. In the corridor lighting I can see more of the geometric markings than before — dark lines running from the base of his neck across the slope of his shoulder, disappearing under fabric that isn’t doing its job anymore. The dark velvet fuzz follows the same lines, catching the warm light in a way that makes it look like something you should touch.

I look at the route display instead. Very firmly.

“The exit window is holding,” I say. Professional. Warm but professional. Morrison would approve. “Four hours to the belt entrance, fourteen-minute gap at the southern pass, then clear running to —“

“I need to change.”

I blink. “Sorry?”

“The tactical suit.” He gestures at the torn shoulder. Clinical. As if the torn fabric revealing the landscape of his upper body is a maintenance issue and not the reason my fingers have been twitching for the past hour. “The damage is compromising thermal regulation. I need to remove it and either repair it or replace it.”

“You want to change clothes. On my ship.”

“I want to perform necessary equipment maintenance. The changing of clothes is an operational requirement of that process.”

“Right. Well.” I gesture toward the cargo bunk. “The door works. Mostly. It sticks, but —“

“The repair requires tools. Your galley repair kit. Which is in the galley.” He pauses. “Which is in the cockpit.”

Where I am. Sitting. In my chair. In the cockpit where he needs to stand and remove his tactical suit and repair it with my tools while I — what? Watch? Leave? Pretend to review route calculations while a seven-foot Xarthian strips down three feet from my pilot’s chair?

I run a rapid secondary threat assessment. He can’t repair the suit from the cargo bunk. He still has the override chip in his gauntlet. If he wanted the container, there are easier moments than this one. The assessment concludes that the immediate danger is less the chip and more the fact that I am about to have a shirtless apex predator in my cockpit and my professionalism has already taken considerable damage today.

“Sprout, is there a way to —“

“No.”

“I haven’t finished the question.”

“You were going to ask if there is an alternative location for equipment repair. There is not. The galley repair kit is integrated into the cockpit workstation. It cannot be moved. I am sorry for the inconvenience.” A pause that is not sorry at all. “I will be monitoring from the ceiling.”

“Fine.” I stand. My voice comes out completely normal and I deserve an award for this. “I’ll get the kit out. You can use the workstation. I need to run a perimeter check on the aft sensors anyway.”

“That can be done from the cockpit console.”

“I prefer to do it from the aft junction.” I do not prefer to do it from the aft junction. I have never once done it from the aft junction. But the aft junction is on the other side of a bulkhead from the cockpit, and the bulkhead is opaque, and this seems important right now.

I pull the repair kit from the cockpit workstation. Set it on the console. Turn to leave. And the Xarthian — Xor — reaches up and unseals the neck of his tactical suit.

The sound is small. A magnetic clasp releasing, a whisper of fabric separating from skin. He’s not performing. He’s not looking at me. He’s conducting necessary equipment maintenance with the brisk efficiency of a man who has changed in field conditions a thousand times and does not consider it noteworthy.

The suit peels back from his left shoulder and I see —

Crimson. Dark geometric lines running from the base of his throat across the deltoid, down the curve of his bicep, forking into precise tributaries where the muscle meets the joint. The black markings are darker against the skin than I expected, the edges sharper, like something etched rather than grown. Between the lines, the velvet fuzz is dense and dark, covering the skin like something alive. His shoulder is broad and heavy with muscle and the entire surface of it is a landscape I want to put my hands on.