Page 59 of Fought and Found

He takes the call on his earpiece. His hand doesn’t release mine—not immediately—but the grip changes. The warmth drains out of it. Professional. The hand of an operative rather than a male. His face reassembles while I watch—jaw setting, eyes flattening to operational gold, the specific blank I recognize now as armor rather than distance. The male I had in the shower, piece by piece, becoming the weapon again.

His tail unwinds from my calf. One degree at a time.

I don’t hear a word Trell says. I hear what Xor’s body does with the words.

The call is less than two minutes. When it ends he sits for a moment with his hand still—technically—in mine. Not holding. Present. The distinction matters.

“Trell,” I say. Not a question.

“Yes.”

“What did he want?”

A beat. The operational pause—the one I’ve learned means he’s choosing what to give me. “He will contact us again at Junction One.”

He doesn’t say what Trell wanted. I don’t ask. I’ve read enough mission files to understand that what Trell wants and what Xor is going to do about it are two different things, and asking before JunctionOne will only make the distance between this moment and that one harder.

His tail doesn’t return to my calf.

I drink my tea. It’s gone cold. I drink it anyway.

Six hours to Junction One. There are things living in those six hours that I don’t have names for yet.

His hand crosses the console once more—brief, the backs of his knuckles against mine—and then returns to the controls.

The purr has gone quiet. I notice when it starts again, ten minutes later, low and unsteady, finding its footing.

I don’t say anything. I just let it.

16

Inventory

Xor

Trelldoesnotwaitfor Junction One.

The private channel pulses hours before the appointment he named. I know the play before I accept the call. I have watched him run it on other assets for thirty years: set the time, then move it. Let the asset build a wall, then arrive before the wall is finished. It is textbook. I helped write the textbook.

Knowing the shape of the knife does not dull the edge.

Flossie is aft. The cockpit is dark except for instrument glow and the long slow crawl of stars toward Junction One. I could decline the call. My hand accepts it without consulting me — thirty years of conditioning collapsing into a single reflex — and the voice arrives in my ear like weather.

“Xax.”

Not Agent Xax. Not my operational designation. My name, in the voice that taught me what my name was worth. Trell has used it perhaps a dozen times in thirty years, and every one of them preceded a request that cost me something.

“Trell.”

“No rank. No protest at the channel breach. You’ve already decided, then.” A pause, warm as a hand on a shoulder. “I trained you too well for either of us to pretend I don’t know what a decision sounds like.”

“You said Junction One.”

“I said what would keep you calm until I was ready.” Paper rustles on the channel — an affectation. Trell has not needed paper in decades. The sound is for me: the sound of his office, of debriefs, of the only room in which anyone ever told me I had done well.“

Saar has missed two scheduled check-ins. Which means he is dead, or he is contained — and my models said nobody contains you, and my models are built on thirty years of you. Whatever happened on that ship, you are still standing. Of course you are. Nothing about you surviving has ever surprised me.”

The words land where he aims them. Sixteen again. An intake corridor, a male with quiet eyes reading my scores, promising asset falling on me like the first warm thing in nine years.