Page 36 of Fought and Found

I read them once. I read them again. The words are efficient — SRS doesn’t waste language, Morrison always said that about them, the economy of organizations that treat people as line items. Non-recoverable asset. A designation. A classification. The same vocabulary Xor used when he boarded my ship and called me the courier and looked through me like I was furniture with a heartbeat.

Except now my name is Florence Knight and the order to kill me was sent while I was lying in his arms.

The sternum goes cold. Not the ache — the ice. The version Morrison trained into me, the crisis mode where feelings get filed for later and the body runs on competence alone. I feel it happen. The warmth pulling inward, banking like a fire being covered. My hands go still on my knees. My spine straightens.

“When did this arrive.”

“During the Merik call. Secondary channel, simultaneous.”

“How many hours ago.”

He swallows. “Six.”

Six hours. He has been carrying this for six hours. Through the tea and the planning and the co-pilot’s chair and the route calculations. Through how do you take it and you already know how I take it and the gap between our fingers on the mug that was a choice and thechoice was the last discipline he had left and none of it — none of it — was the whole truth.

“Six hours.” My voice is quiet. Not warm. The warmth is banked and what’s left is the Morrison underneath — cold, precise, operational. I can hear it happening, and I can’t stop it and I don’t want to stop it because warm Flossie would crack right now and cold Flossie can keep this ship in the air. “You’ve been sitting next to me for six hours with a kill order in your comms.”

“I was not going to —“

“I know you weren’t going to execute it.” The words come out sharp. Certain. Because I do know. I knew it the moment his claws retracted for me — both hands, all ten points, the body choosing gentleness. I knew it in the bunk when his arm held me and his purr ran through my spine and his biology chose me before his brain caught up. I am not afraid of Xor Xax. I have never been afraid of Xor Xax. “That is not the point.”

“Then —“

“The point is you sat here for six hours deciding what I get to know about my own survival.” I stand. The chair gives on its rail. I don’t close the distance between us because if I get inside his heat radius right now my body will override my anger and I need the anger. The anger is correct. “The point is that someone typed eliminate next to my name and you decided — you, alone, without asking me — that the appropriate response was to hide it and plan routes and drink my tea and sit in my chair and hope I wouldn’t notice that you were shaking.”

“I noticed,” I say. “I noticed six hours ago and I didn’t push because I trusted you to tell me. I gave you time and you used it to protect me from information I had a right to have.”

His claws punch into the armrest. The polymer cracks — not the controlled crescent marks of suppression. The full force of a Xarthian in distress, splitting the material, and beneath his hands the armrest fractures and his face —

His face is wrecked.

Not the mask. Not the weapon casing. The male underneath. The one who shook. The one who purred. The one who wrote makes me feel brave — no, I wrote that. He read it and his hands trembled and he couldn’t get the shaking to stop. That male. Staring at me with gold eyes that are wet at the edges and a jaw that is working on a word he cannot get out.

“I was not — the concealment was not —“ His voice breaks. Not cleanly. The processing failure, the ugly one, the narration going haywire. “Trell withholds information to maintain operational control. I was not — I did not intend to replicate — the comparison is not —“

I didn’t make the comparison. He made it himself. He heard his own actions and put them next to Trell’s and the collision is happening inside him without me having to say a word.

“I do not know how to do this.” The words arrive raw, pulled from somewhere that has no training and no framework. His tail is hanging between the chair and the console, limp, the tremor running its full length. “I do not know how to refuse an order and keep you alive and — the operational framework for protecting someone without controlling the information is —“ He stops. His chest heaves. The purr starts — broken, wrong, not the steady vibration from the bunk but a stuttering, ragged thing. “There is no protocol for this. I have no protocol for —“

He can’t finish.

The sentence dies in his throat. His framework has no architecture for what he’s trying to say, which is: I didn’t tell you because telling you meant watching your face change, and your face looking at me like I’m worth recording is the only good thing I’ve had in thirty years, and I chose five more minutes of it over your right to know, and I would make that choice again, and I hate that I would make that choice again.

He doesn’t say any of this. He doesn’t have to. His tail said it. His hands said it. The six hours of meticulous planning said it — the male who sat beside me building an escape route with the same hands that were carrying my death warrant.

My sternum aches. Under the ice, under the Morrison training, under the cold operational efficiency that is keeping me upright — the other thing. The enormous, formless thing that has been growing since the dust belt. Not warm. Not cold. Just large, pressing against the inside of my ribs, demanding space.

“You start,” I say, and my voice shakes on the word and I let it, “by not hiding things from the person you’re trying to protect.”

He looks at me. The wet at the edges of his eyes catches the amber cockpit light.

“I don’t need you to have a protocol. I need you to have a conversation. With me. Before you make decisions about my life.” A breath. The anger is real. It’s not going anywhere. It exists alongside the other thing and both of them live in the sternum now, pressing against each other. “Can you do that.”

“Yes.” Scraped. Immediate. No hesitation, no qualification, no clinical assessment of the request. Just the word, pulled from the same place the purr came from.

“Again.”

“I will not conceal information that concerns your safety or your choices.” He swallows. “Flossie. I will not.”