Page 33 of Fought and Found

“We leave in four hours,” she says. “That gives us the window.”

“Four hours.”

She nods. Stands.

She stretches — arms above her head, spine arching, the unhurried extension of her body that has been living in mine since the bunk — and I do not look away.

I have been looking away since I came through the airlock. Running the cost, accounting for what it meant, keeping it at operational distance. The message in my deleted files has changed the calculation. I have already chosen, in the place that makes choices before the brain is consulted, and the cost of looking has shifted.

She drops her arms. Turns. Finds my eyes on her.

A beat. Something moves across her face that she doesn’t finish.

“I think,” she says carefully, “you should get some rest.”

“I have not slept.”

“I know, lovey.” The gentleness that undoes me faster than any other register she has. “Rest. I’ll wake you when it’s time.”

She leaves. The cockpit holds her scent — peppermint, wool, warmth. The console holds the route to Junction One, the plan we built together, the architecture of getting her somewhere safe.

Getting her somewhere safe. Telling her. Surviving what comes after.

I don’t know what comes after.

But I know this: I have already chosen her over Trell. Over the only life I have known. Over the weapon I was built to be.

The kill order is still in my deleted files.

But so is she.

And I have already chosen.

I sit in the pilot’s chair. Her chair. The fairy lights reflect in the darkened display. The blanket folded over the back smells like her.

I press my fists against my thighs. The crescent marks are bleeding again — small dark half-moons in crimson skin, the cost of holding it, written in the same hands that held her. I do not bandage them. The pain is a record.

The purr stirs in my chest. Low. Involuntary. The dead frequency that came back in her arms and will not go dormant again. I let it run. I do not fight it.

The purr and the kill order and the blank option tree — they coexist in me now, and the coexistence is the closest thing to honest my body has ever been.

In the cargo hold, she is running pre-flight checks. I can hear her voice — talking to Sprout, talking to the ship, the chatty warmth that fills every room she enters.

She is humming. The aimless melody.

I memorize the sound she makes when she does not know she is being listened to.

10

Compromised

Flossie

Somethingiswrongwithhim and he won’t tell me what it is.

I have been running pre-flight checks for two hours. He has been sitting in the pilot’s chair — my chair, the one he moved to after the planning session — running tactical projections with the focused efficiency of a male who is very good at his job and very bad at hiding things from people who read bodies for a living.

I fed him an hour ago — actual food, a ration tray balanced on the console edge, which he emptied one-handed without once pausing the tactical display. Sprout logged the calorie intake with the quiet satisfaction of a vindicated parent.