Page 30 of Fought and Found

The purr has not stopped.

I have stopped trying to kill it.

My comms unit is on the console. The light that should not be there is still there. I have not looked at it directly since the Merik transmission ended, and I am not going to look at it now, and soon none of that will matter.

9

The Order

Xor

Themessagearrivedonehour after the Merik transmission terminated.

Separate channel. Priority encryption. Director Trell’s personal clearance code — not routed through Merik, not logged in the standard handler cycle. Not routed through the ship’s systems either, because Trell is thorough and Trell knows I don’t use ship AIs and Trell has designed a message that will exist in exactly one place: my personal comms unit. No witness. No log. No record outside the unit in my hand.

Trell, who found me at sixteen in the Proving Dens and called me a promising asset. Who has not needed a personal channel in nine years, because I have never given him reasonto use one.

A message that exists outside the standard reporting cycle, which means Merik reported up and Trell made a decision and the decision arrived while the warmth of her sleeping face was still on my throat.

One hour. Not a day and a half. Trell did not wait for inconsistencies to generate a flag. Trell heard the courier is cooperating and heard something in the cooperation that required a personal channel and a direct order. The window I gave her is a lie. I did not know it was a lie when I gave it. I know now.

I have not opened the message. I do not need to open the message. There is only one communication Director Trell sends on a personal channel to a Tier 1 agent whose handler has just confirmed a target is cooperating. I have received this communication four times in nine years. The language varies. The content does not.

Eliminate.

I know this the way I know Xarthian atmospheric composition or the draw weight of a Kessler-9 sidearm. The knowledge is structural. It does not require the message to be opened to be true.

She is sitting in the pilot’s chair across the cockpit, plotting routes with the competence that has been dismantling my operational framework since the moment she refused to surrender. Her braid is escaping at the temples. The pen is behind her ear. The notebook is in her cardigan pocket, where my name is written next to the word brave.

The message sits in my comms unit like ordnance with the pin pulled.

I do not open it.

“The Voss-Meridian corridor.” I pull up the route overlay and my voice is operational. Steady. The instrument Trell built. “Mineral density in the corridor disrupts standard tracking beyond the fourth navigation marker. If we enter at the Meridian junction and maintain sub-light through the densest strata, SRS loses continuous telemetry for approximately eleven hours.”

“Eleven hours isn’t enough.” She leans forward. Her shoulder enters my peripheral vision — cardigan, the singed patch at the elbow she hasn’t mended, the collar of the tactical vest visible beneath. “I’ve run the Voss-Meridian nine times. The exit window narrows at the fifth marker because the mineral composition changes — denser silicates, better signal propagation. SRS will pick us up again inside fourteen minutes of clearing the belt.”

She is correct. She is always correct about routes, about the Outer Rim, about the specific operational geography that twelve years of courier work has mapped into her instincts with the same precision SRS mapped tactical protocols into mine. This has been inconvenient since the moment I boarded her ship. It has not become less inconvenient.

The message is in my comms unit. Three meters from her hand.

“The fourteen-minute exposure window can be mitigated.” My fingers move across the display. “If we transition from the corridor directly into the Reach, commercial traffic density provides cover. SRS will need to run individual transponder queries. At standard processing rates —“

“We disappear in the noise.” She nods. Her fingers pull up the commercial traffic overlay and our hands are working the same display, her right and my left, and her knuckle brushes the base of my thumb.

The contact is incidental. An inch ofskin against skin.

My claws retract. Both hands. Immediate, involuntary — the body choosing gentleness before the brain has processed the input. The message is in my comms unit and her knuckle is warm against my thumb and the body carrying the kill order is the same body that just pulled itself back from her, and I need those two facts to be separate and they are not.

I withdraw my hand. Place it on the armrest. The co-pilot’s armrest, the one with the tea ring stain, the one that belongs to the chair she gave me without being asked. She gave me the chair and the tea and her name in the dark and the word brave and I am carrying an order to kill her.

“Xor?” She is looking at my hand on the armrest. The retracted claws. “You all right?”

“The route requires additional analysis.”

She watches me for two seconds. Brown eyes, steady, the Morrison-trained assessment running behind them — the same instinct that reads customs officers and dockworkers and the particular silence of someone who is not telling the truth. Then she turns back to the display.

“Right. The route.”