Page 52 of Fought and Found

"Trell," she says. Not a question.

"Trell called mepromising assetwhen I was sixteen and it was the closest thing to a father's approval I had received in years. He told meI was his. Nothis agent. His." I hear the word and the resonance has changed. When I boarded the ship it would have been neutral — the possessive of a commanding officer. Now it sits in the cockpit next to the memory of her hand on my face and her voice sayingyou're ours nowthrough an AI that had been hostile to me from the moment I stepped aboard. And the difference between his and ours is the entire distance between what I was and what I am becoming.

"I am giving up the only family I have known for thirty years."

I say it. Flat. Let the words exist.

"And it is not close."

She blinks. "What?"

"The calculation. The operational assessment of what I am losing against what I have —" I stop. My jaw works. The processing failure approaching — I can feel it, the vocabulary failing, the clinical language crumbling under the weight of something that does not fit in any briefing. "What I have gained. The maths should be close. Against a handful of days on a cargo ship with a woman who names her weapons and writes down lost things and kissed me in a corridor while my blood was on her hands."

"And?"

"It is not close." The words arrive from the place beneath the framework, the place where the purr lives. "You win by a margin that embarrasses me."

She does not cry. She does not reach for me. She does not perform the emotional response that the moment seems to demand. She sits in the pilot's chair with her hands in her lap and her lips pressed together and her eyes very bright and she nods once.

"Good," she says. The word has weight. The weight of a woman who has been flying alone for ten years and has just been told that thedistance between her and loneliness is not close and the male saying it means every syllable. "Good."

Her hand crosses the console. Finds mine. Fingers lacing through — small and callused, the blaster-worn tips fitting between my broad knuckles. She squeezes. I squeeze back. The crescent marks in my palms press against her skin and she does not flinch from the scars.

The purr runs steady. Low. The bonding frequency filling the cockpit alongside the mineral light and the want and the smell of both of us.

I turn back to the tactical display. She turns back to the corridor. We fly hand in hand and neither of us mentions it and the not-mentioning is the loudest thing in the ship.

Her pulse is in her fingertips.

I can feel it against my palm—the living fact of it, faint and regular, the biological confirmation that she is here and warm and real and five feet tall and in possession of my entire operating system.

I have held hands with no one in thirty years. SRS does not train for this. There is no operational category for the specific quality of a hand in yours when you have given up everything for the person attached to it and have no regrets about the arithmetic.

Five hours and fifty-one minutes remain on the corridor counter. I am aware of every second.

We exit the corridor at marker nine. The mineral walls open like a jaw and the Petal slides into open space — black, star-scattered,the Reach spreading ahead with Junction One a long transit through charted territory.

The relief lasts eleven seconds.

"Incoming transmission," Sprout announces. The orb is cycling gold — not battle white, not amber. A colour I have not seen before. Cautious. "Not SRS. Not military. Independent frequency. Encrypted, but the encryption is —" a pause, "theatrical. It wants to be noticed."

"Source?"

"The encryption signature matches the Drask Acquisitions methodology from the spoofed kill order." Another cycle. "He is hailing directly. He knows we are alive. He knows we exited the corridor." The orb cycles once. "He began transmitting ninety seconds after we cleared the exit marker. He was waiting for us."

Flossie's hand tightens in mine. One squeeze. Not fear — readiness. Then she lets go, and both hands find the flight controls, and she is the pilot again.

My tail, which has been learning new forms of insubordination with every passing hour, slides from the armrest to her thigh. Not the tentative brush from the corridor. The full weight, settling against her leg with possessive certainty, and she does not push it away. Her hand drops from the controls for one second — finds the tail, squeezes once, firm, the last twelve inches, and the sensation jolts through me hard enough that I grip the armrest. Her lips twitch. Then both hands return to the controls and her face goes professional.

"Put him through."

The cockpit display flickers. Not a face — Drask does not provide visual. An audio waveform, elegant and precise, the kind of signal processing that costs more than most ships.

"Operative Xax." The voice is smooth. Cultured. The accent is cosmopolitan — educated across multiple systems, the kind of elocution that money buys when money has been buying things for several generations. "Or should I say former operative? The distinction is rather new. I understand congratulations are in order. Going non-compliant is always such a dramatic step."

I know this voice. Not personally — by reputation. Varren Drask operates in the space between legal and criminal the way a surgeon operates between organs: precisely, profitably, and with complete disregard for which side of the line the incision falls on.

"Drask." I keep my voice flat. Operational. The weapon casing serves a purpose when the audience is a predator. "Your spoofed kill order has been identified. SRS will trace the encryption breach within hours."