Page 23 of Fought and Found

“The courier.” I set my mug down hard enough that tea slops over the rim. “I have a name. You used it an hour ago. You used it while my fingers were on the back of your neck, and you were purring. So you can either call me Flossie like a person or you can recalibrate your own bloody scanners.”

His jaw locks. The marking along the hinge flushes dark—the heat response I’ve learned to read, the one that means his body is doing something his brain hasn’t authorized. He turns back to the display without answering.

“The courier” it is, then. Brilliant.

Sprout’s orb descends from the ceiling. “I have updated the Xarthian’s threat classification from ‘Complicated’ to ‘Tactically Irrational — Classification Pending Review.’ I believe this is more precise.”

“Sprout.” My voice carries a warning.

“I said what I said.”

He feeds us SRS intercept protocols. Blind spots, access codes, tactical weaknesses—dismantling his employer’s architecture with quiet efficiency while simultaneously treating me like an operational asset he’s been assigned to manage. He stands at the co-pilot’s station—not the chair, the station, because the chair is where he sat six hours ago like he belonged there and neither of us has addressed that. His forearm crosses my sightline as he adjusts the display. The fuzz along his wrist catches the amber glow — dark and dense and I know exactly what it feels like now, the velvet-warm density of it, the way his skin temperature spiked beneath my touch when I traced the geometric lines. I know what the sound is that he makes when you find the right spot at the base of his horn. I know the precise weight and heat of him folded across the co-pilot’s chair, the way the purr started low and built into something that lived in my sternum. My hands are wrappedaround my mug. I am keeping them there on purpose. The mug is doing important work right now. He is standing eighteen inches away cataloging merc formations as if none of this is recorded in his body, and I am cataloging his body as if none of this is recorded in mine, and we are both liars.

It is. I can see every piece of evidence, and it is doing nothing to help me concentrate. His nostrils flare every time I shift in my chair — an involuntary expansion, his olfactory system cataloging me against his will. He is tracking my position in this cockpit through his senses while pretending to read the display, and I know this because I am tracking his. The way the marking at his jaw flushes dark when I lean across the console for the navigation controls. The way his tail twitches toward me and gets hauled back to his calf with a rigidity that must ache — three and a half feet of muscle fighting a decision his training made, and his body is disputing. The fact that he has started two sentences in the past thirty minutes and swallowed them both before they cleared his teeth. He smells me when I move. I feel the heat of him when he leans close to the display. We are two people working in a very small space who have had their hands on each other and are both pretending this is a neutral state of affairs.

He reaches past me for the display controls, and his arm is six inches from my face and the fuzz on his forearm is right there, and I look at the ceiling instead. “You’re being an asshole on purpose,” I say, during a lull in the tactical planning.

He does not look up from the display. “I am maintaining operational focus.”

“You’re hiding behind operational focus because you told me no one has touched you gently and it scared you so badly you’ve rebooted the entire asshole operating system.”

Silence. The kind that has weight. His claws drive into the console polymer—five crescent marks, precise, the same shape as the ones in his palms—and the display flickers.

“Your psychological assessment is not required.”

“It’s not a psychological assessment, lovey. It’s an observation. I make those. I write them in my diary.” I lean back in my chair. “Which, for the record, you read at three in the morning when you thought I was asleep.”

His head turns. Slowly. The gold eyes are wide and the expression on his face is the closest thing tocaughtI have ever seen on a seven-foot Xarthian predator.

“You were not asleep.”

“I was mostly asleep. Sprout wasn’t.”

“I noted the notebook’s displacement,” Sprout confirms. “0317. Returned at 0342 at the correct angle but with a 2-degree rotational variance. The Xarthian’s attention to detail is adequate but not flawless.”

The silence that follows is spectacular. He stares at me. I stare at him. His tail is doing something complicated near his ankle that he is pretending is not happening, and the flush along his markings has spread from jaw to collar, and I am enjoying this far more than the tactical situation warrants.

“The notebook contains operationally relevant intelligence,” he says, and his voice is almost—almost—defensive.

“It contains a list of lost things that nobody’s looking for. You read it cover to cover, and you put it back at the exact angle because you didn’t want me to know.” I hold his gaze. “That’s not reconnaissance, Xor. That’s caring. And you’re terrible at it, which is how I know it’s real.”

He turns back to the display. Says nothing. But his claws retract from the console, and his shoulders drop half an inch, and his tail uncurls one inch from his calf before he catches it.

I let him have the silence. Some things need to sit before they can be filed.

The last merc signature drops off the scope at 0214, deep in the ship’s night.

I watch them go—eight bright points scattering across the dust belt like seeds blown off course, search patterns widening as they chase the vector Xor fed them three hours ago. The wrong vector. His codes, his protocols, his intimate knowledge of exactly how SRS formations lose coherence in low-visibility terrain, all turned quietly inside out and pointed at empty space.

“Confirming all eight signatures beyond effective scanner range,” Sprout announces. “The Petal is invisible. I am incredible. You are both welcome.”

The unclassified signal fires again at 0216. Same signature. Same eleven-second window. Gone before I can source it. Sprout’s orb pulses once — that tight, uncertain oscillation I’ve seen exactly twice now — then logs: Classification: Unassigned. Recommend continued monitoring. I do not like it either.

Xor does not look up from the display. “They will regroup. Standard SRS protocol after a failed intercept is to establish a grid search. We have five to six hours before they sweep back to our current position.”

“Five hours,” I say. The adrenaline is draining out of me in stages, each one pulling something structural with it. Eighteen hours since my last sleep. The cockpit chair creaks under me and my spine objects and I think about curling up in it the way I did last night—legs folded, cardigan over my shoulders, cheek against the headrest that still smells faintly of the lemon polish I use when I’m anxious.

Last night I didn’t have a seven-foot Xarthian watching me sleep from across the cockpit. Last night I wasn’t vibrating with residual terror and the memory of his tail on my thigh and the wordgentlesitting in my chest like a stone I swallowed.