Page 39 of Fought and Found

“The —“

“The tactical projections.” I pick up my cold tea. Take a sip. Set it down. “Very illuminating. Very thorough. I particularly appreciate the attention to detail.”

The marking along his jaw floods dark. His tail tightens on my arm by exactly one incremental degree. The purr shifts register — just slightly, just enough.

I keep my face completely neutral.

The kill order glows on the display beneath our joined hands.

With my other hand, I hold on.

11

The Corridor

Xor

Sheturnstheinstrumentsoff.

“Ferro-magnetic interference,” she says, adjusting course with one hand. The other holds tea. “Instruments recalibrate at the second marker and most pilots overcorrect. Morrison’s solution was to take my screens away and make me learn the corridor blind.” She threads a gap between two mineral deposits with a clearance margin of eleven meters and does not appear to consider this remarkable. “Tenth time through. You’d think it would stop being fun.”

It has not stopped being fun. I can see this in the line of her body — the forward lean, the light hands on the controls, the particular curve of her spine that I have been memorizing since she flew us through the dust belt with the same terrifying confidence. She is enjoying this. Sheis threading a mineral corridor at sub-light with no instruments and a kill order filed against her, and she is enjoying it.

My body responds to her competence with the subtlety of a detonation. The ridges along my shaft thicken — a slow, dense pulse that I cannot suppress and cannot disguise, the fabric of my trousers entirely inadequate for the biological reality of a Xarthian in proximity to a woman his body has classified as mate. The knot throbs at the base with each adjustment of her wrist on the flight controls. I am hard. I have been hard since we entered the corridor and the cockpit contracted to this dim, enclosed space where her scent has nowhere to go.

I shift in the chair. The friction against the ridges is a punishment I deserve for looking at her hands.

The kill order is in my personal channel. I have read it fifty-seven times since it arrived and have not produced a plan from it. The framework for execution requires: intent, designation, window. The window is the next nine hours. The intent is —

The intent is not processing.

I note this. I do not examine it.

The corridor narrows, and she rolls the Petal — a lateral drift that puts the belly toward the denser wall, reducing cross-section. The maneuver is textbook except for the added lateral skid that no manual would endorse, skimming the port side within six meters of the formation.

“That drift increases our signal shadow by forty-three percent,” I say, because mathematics is the only language I have left that does not betray me.

“Measured it on my fourth run.” A sip of tea. She reactivates the instruments as the mineral composition stabilizes. The displayspopulate — clean shadow, no tracking, nine hours of cover. She sets the flight controls to passive, leans back, and rolls her neck.

The movement pulls her collar to the side. The skin of her throat is flushed pink and her pulse is visible in the hollow above her collarbone. Rapid. She glances at me — a quick check, brown eyes passing over my face and then dropping to my lap where the state of my body is not subtle and the ridges are pressing hard against the fabric — and she looks away. The flush on her neck deepens. Spreads to her collarbones. She does not comment.

She does not open a vent.

The cockpit is dense with me. The compatible-mate signal has been pouring off my skin since the bunk and the recycled air is saturated — thick, dark, spiced, the pheromone output that my biology produces specifically and exclusively in the presence of a female my body has identified as compatible. She can smell it. Humans have limited range but the concentration in this cockpit exceeds any limitation. Every inhale she takes is an inhale of me, and her body is responding — the rapid pulse, the flush, the shift in her scent that my nostrils track with obsessive precision. Beneath the peppermint and wool, the darker note. The one I cataloged in the bunk while she slept. The thick, sweet evidence that she is aroused.

She knows what I can smell. She knew in the bunk, when her body was chasing mine in her sleep, and she knows now. She is sitting in the dim cockpit with the evidence of my want pressing against my trousers and the evidence of hers in every breath I take, and neither of us has touched the match.

“Sprout,” she says, and her voice catches on the consonant — a small roughness that lands in the base of my spine, “what’s our status.”

“Dark. No tracking. Nine hours at current velocity.” A pause. The orb dims to low amber. “I am reducing my environmental monitoring to external threats only. The internal atmospheric data is generating readings I have decided, in my professional judgment, to stop recording.”

“Sprout —“

“I said what I said. The pheromone saturation alone is enough to trigger three separate biohazard classifications, none of which I intend to file. Wake me if something tries to kill us. The current situation is not lethal, although the Xarthian’s blood pressure is making a compelling argument.”

The orb dims to near-dark.

We are alone. In the dark. For nine hours. The cockpit lit by mineral glow through the viewport — amber and copper, shifting as we drift — and the emergency strips along the floor. Her face in this light is all angles and shadow and the flush on her throat has not faded.