Page 77 of Fought and Found

“Your resignation from OOPS. Effective immediately.” She pulls up a display. Typing. Not looking at me. “Allied services contract —standing offer for SNAG Recovery Services to coordinate with OOPS logistics on contested-space operations. Standard rates plus a 15% allied surcharge because I am not a charity.”

She is building me a safety net and calling it paperwork.

“Morrison-approved priority docking at Junction One. Access to OOPS intelligence feeds on a case-by-case basis. If you need extraction —“ She pauses. The typing stops. Resumes. “— OOPS offers competitive rates for allied operations. I’ll send the contract terms.”

If you need extraction, I will come for you. Always. That’s what that sentence means. My eyes sting.

“SRS status.” Still typing. Still not looking at me. “My contacts confirm your Yulx reached the neutral relay and transmitted ahead — the chip itself follows by hand. The intelligence trade is working. Early SRS chatter has your Xarthian trending toward ‘presumed lost — operational compromise, no recovery value.’ Bureaucratic language for: not worth hunting.” She pauses. “For now. Trell is pragmatic. The next director may not be. That is all I can give you.”

“For now is enough.”

“The Tessaro delivery.”

“I’m delivering it myself. Personally. To Velar Prime. My last OOPS job, Morrison, and I’m finishing it by the book. Xor flies with me.”

She looks at me. Over the display. The blue eyes. “Your last OOPS job. Done right.”

“Done right.”

“Final delivery authorization granted. Triple-rate fee plus the hazard surcharge Sprout invoiced, which I approved because the hazard was —“ She clears her throat. “—significant.”

“Morrison.”

“The Finder’s Market. Level 2, Unit 7.” She pulls up something on the display — a floor plan. She has had a floor plan ready. She has been preparing a floor plan for the company I hadn’t officially founded yet because Morrison is always three steps ahead and two of those steps involve real estate. “Commercial space suitable for a small recovery operation. Structural assessment is clean. Two private offices, a client intake area, docking ring access through the service corridor. The lease is reasonable. It is close to the docking ring, which is operationally advantageous.” A beat. “And it is close to my office. Which is —“ She stares at the floor plan. “— also operationally advantageous.”

She wants us at Junction One. She wants us where she can see us, reach us, protect us. She is offering a commercial lease the way another person would offer an embrace — here, I made you a place, stay close, let me keep you alive.

“Unit 7,” I say. My voice has gone thick. “I’ll look at it.”

“You’ll take it. The alternatives are inferior. I have researched them all.” She closes the display. Folds her hands on the desk. The typing is done. The safety net is built and labelled and entered into the system. Morrison is sitting behind her desk with her hands folded and her back very straight and her eyes very bright and the silence in the room is the kind that has weather.

I hug her.

I don’t ask. I don’t warn. I don’t give her time to brace or deflect or retreat to operational mode. I walk around the desk and I put my arms around Morrison and I hold on.

She goes rigid.

Every muscle. The body of a woman who has spent years being the strongest person in every room. Who does not get hugged. Who has built a career on the principle that vulnerability is a liability and affection is expressed through competence and coffee mugs and three-in-the-morning phone calls and never, never through arms and contact and the physical admission that another person’s warmth matters.

I hold on.

She smells like coffee and station recycled air and the faintest trace of the soap she has used since I met her — unscented, practical, Morrison in a bottle. She is shorter than I expected. Or I have forgotten. Or the woman who looms so large in my life takes up less physical space than the shape she occupies in my chest.

For three seconds, nothing. Rigid. The reinforced-steel desk between us figuratively even though it’s behind her now. Morrison’s defenses are not doors; they are architecture. They are load-bearing walls. They are the structure that holds her upright and if she removes them she does not know what shape she will be.

One arm comes up.

Pats twice.

Two pats on my back. Firm. Brief. The contact of a woman who is touching someone for the first time in — I don’t know. Years. The pats say everything Morrison will never say out loud. They say: I built you, and you are leaving, and I am letting you go because that is what you do with things you build well, you let them go, and this is the hardest thing I have done in twenty-three years of hard things and I love you, Florence, and I will never say that sentence, not once, not ever, so take the two pats and go before I become someone neither of us recognizes.

The arm drops. Morrison clears her throat. Steps back. Adjusts something on her desk that does not need adjusting. Straightens the coffee mug. Moves a data pad two inches to the left. Moves it back.

My eyes are streaming. I am crying in Morrison’s office and Morrison is straightening things on her desk and neither of us is addressing either fact.

“Go.” Her voice is rough. Not broken — roughened. The sound of a surface that has been worn smooth by something it will not name. “Before I change my mind about the allied services contract.”

“Morrison —“