Page 37 of Fought and Found

My name. The promise. His wrecked voice. The purr guttering like a candle in wind.

I believe him. Not because the words are convincing but because his body has never lied to me — only his mouth has — and his body right now is a male who has cracked himself open on the truth and doesn’t know how to put the pieces back.

I sit back down.

Not next to him. In the co-pilot’s chair. My chair. A meter of console between us, the kill order still glowing on the display, his cracked armrest leaking polymer dust onto the floor.

The fury is banked but present. A low burn behind my sternum, sitting next to the other thing. I will be angry about this for a while — not the kill order, I’ve been a courier in contested space for twelve years and people have wanted me dead before, the wanting is just logistics. I’ll be angry about the hiding. About the six hours. About the male who learned to shake and immediately used the new vulnerability to keep a secret.

But I’m here. And he’s here. And the kill order is on the table, which means we can plan around it, which means we are doing the thing Morrison trained me to do: feel later, fix now.

“Right.” I pull the display toward me. The nine words sit there, efficient and deadly. I look at them the way I look at nav charts — as coordinates, not a death sentence. “Trell. Not Merik. That’s worse.”

“Significantly.” His voice is steadier. The tactical brain re-engaging. Not the mask — the real version, the one that works alongside the shaking instead of pretending it doesn’t exist. “Trell on a personal channel bypassing the handler cycle means he is running a parallel assessment. The window I estimated —“

“Is optimistic.”

“Yes.”

“How optimistic?”

“I do not know. Trell’s parallel processing is not predictable by standard metrics. The window may be twenty-four hours. It may be twelve.”

“Then it’s good we’re leaving in four.” I pull up the corridor approach. The route he built — our route, the architecture we made together — sits on the display beside the kill order, and the juxtaposition is obscene. A plan for survival next to a plan for my death, both from the same organization. “Junction One is still viable?”

“More viable now.” He leans forward. His shoulder is close to mine — not touching, not yet, the gap deliberate and necessary and I’m maintaining it on purpose because the anger hasn’t finished its work. But close. “If Trell is operating on a personal channel, it means the kill order is outside standard SRS documentation. Merik may not know. The cleanup team Trell dispatches will be smaller, faster, but operating with limited institutional support.”

“Which means Morrison’s defenses at Junction One only need to hold against a small team, not a fleet.”

“Correct.” He pauses. The tactical assessment running behind the gold eyes, and underneath it the other thing — the gratitude, the disbelief, the expression of a male who has just been caught in the worst lie of his life and the woman he lied to is sitting beside him runninglogistics instead of leaving. “Your Morrison. She will not welcome an SRS agent.”

“Former SRS agent.”

He goes still. “Former.”

“You sat in my chair. You drank my tea. You lied to your handler and purred in my bunk and got a kill order for your trouble. You’re not SRS anymore, lovey.” The word comes back. Not warm yet. Not the full version. But present, like the first green thing after a fire — small, tentative, choosing to grow in the ash. “You’re a problem that hasn’t figured out what it wants to be yet.”

His mouth moves. The architecture of a smile that doesn’t quite arrive. His tail — which has been hanging limp since the revelation — twitches. Once. Toward me.

He catches it.

I reach across the console.

Not for him. I put my hand on the surface between us. Palm up. Fingers uncurled. Open.

The reach. The touch reflex that has been firing since the day he boarded — fingers twitching toward his torn gear, redirected. Fingers aching for his crescent marks, folded behind my sternum. The compulsive, involuntary grab for things that need mending, things that need holding, things that are hurting.

I stop redirecting.

My hand sits on the console. Palm up. In the space where the kill order glows on the display beneath it, my hand offers the simplest possible thing: I’m here. I’m angry. I’m not leaving. Come here if you want to.

He stares at my palm.

His breathing changes. Shorter. The ragged pattern of a male whose framework has no category for an open hand in the space where a death warrant sits. His claws cycle — extend, retract, the last one — and then they’re in. All ten points. Smooth pads. The choice his body keeps making.

His tail crosses first.

Slow. The tremor visible in every inch of it. It uncurls from the dead hang, lifts, reaches across the console, and the tip touches my wrist. Warm fuzz against my pulse point. My heart rate spikes — he can feel it, I know he can, Xarthian senses reading the acceleration through the contact — and I let him feel it. No hiding. No composure. Let the evidence sit.