Page 80 of Fought and Found

Every light in the segment dies.

Not for me. Sprout knows my eyes, knows exactly where I stand — the emergency strips at my feet stay lit in a path useful only to a woman who is five-foot-four exactly. For them: blind dark and an angry AI in the walls. Doors cycling at random. Their squad channel shriekingstatic. And me, moving low along my lit path while the second hostile fires at the place I no longer am.

I put a stun bolt in his knee, and a second in his chest when he drops.

Three minutes. That is what it takes. The longest three minutes since the boarding fight, my heart slamming Morrison-steady, the sealed door behind me ringing and ringing —

— and then the ringing stops, because four black claws have punched through fifty tonnes of emergency polymer and are peeling it open like a ration tin.

Xor comes through the gap sideways, shoulders first, tearing it wider on the way. His markings are black — jaw to collar, full combat saturation — and his eyes find me instantly in Sprout's dark, and the sound he is making is the below-language one, the one the Dens never reached.

The loop-carrier — shoulder-shot, still game — makes the final mistake of his professional evening. He moves. Toward me.

I don't see all of what happens next. Sprout's dark, Xarthian speed. I hear one impact. When the lights come up, a Drask acquisition specialist is folded against the corridor wall a metre above the deck, unconscious, held there briefly by nothing but the memory of velocity before he slides down it.

"Flossie." Wrecked. Rough. His hands are already moving over me — jaw, throat, arms, ribs, the field-medic inventory at combat speed. "You are —"

"Not touched. Not a scratch, lovey. Sprout took the only shot that mattered." My voice is steady. My hands are not. I let him see both, because we don't hide things. His forehead comes down to mine,horns bracketing careful, and the black drains from his markings one degree at a time.

Boots. Many boots — dock security arriving in a spill of light and shouting, Morrison's net closing over two professionals who are going to wake up in an OOPS holding cell with very reasonable rates.

I look down. Sprout's orb lists in the air like a boxer refusing the count. Scorch mark across the amber. A hairline crack through the casing.

"Sprout."

"Orb integrity sixty-one percent." The sass comes back online mid-sentence and I have never been so glad to hear anything. "I would like a new chassis. Something in gunmetal. And I want it minuted for the permanent record: nobody touches my human."

"Minuted." My eyes are stinging again. Twice in one day. "Archived. Backed up to three separate servers."

"Correct."

Xor has not let go of me. One hand at the back of my neck, tail around my waist, and against all good sense the adrenaline is converting — the combat chemistry and the alcove and his heat and the fact that we are both alive arriving in my body as one unreasonable demand. He smells it. His pupils blow wide. Neither of us moves, in a corridor filling with security personnel, and the not-moving is its own entire event.

"He interrupted, Xor." I say it against his chest. Precise. Furious. "I was having a moment. Now I'm actually cross."

"Noted." The purr rebuilds under the word. "We will file the complaint together. Tonight."

The comm panel above us chimes. Morrison. Of course Morrison — forty seconds behind her own security, which across the width of a station is basically clairvoyance.

"Florence. Status."

"Two of Drask's people for your holding cells, Sprout needs a new chassis, and your service corridor needs a new door."

A pause. The specific Morrison pause of a woman recalculating a threat she thought she had priced. "The delivery moves up. You leave for Velar Prime at first window." Her voice could strip hull paint. "And Florence — the allied services contract activated the moment they touched my station. Drask just became an OOPS problem."

The channel closes. Xor's tail tightens. Sprout lists against my shoulder, scorched and smug. Somewhere on or off this station, a broker is learning that his team failed, his sale is dead, and the incidental courier is still standing.

Drask keeps underestimating what I write down. He can add this to the list: I write down debts.

And tonight — after the fight, after the fear, after the male beside me tore a door off the universe to get to me — tonight we own the clock.

22

The Delivery

Flossie

ThefirsttimeIsaw this male, he cut through my airlock to take a container.