Page 93 of Fought and Found

The tapping continues. Soft. Patient. The tail’s morning petition. I press my palm to the wall again and his heartbeat steadies in my sternum — the calm that comes when he feels me reaching back, even through plasterboard. The touching is limited by architecture and the limitation is the opposite of what either of us wants and the wanting is the opposite of lonely and I will never get used to it and I don’t want to.

The comm chirps at 1042.

I straighten in my chair. Smooth my collar — the open one, the claiming mark visible. The channel ID is one I know by heart now: the first number in SNAG’s client register. Case 001. Three weeks of pulling at a thread that someone went to considerable trouble to bury.

“SNAG Recovery Services. Good morning, lovey.”

“Ms Knight.” The client. Human. The tremble in her voice is worse this week — the particular tremble of a woman holding herself together with the fraying edges of hope, and the fraying is further along than it was on Monday. “I’m sorry to call again. You said to call. You said — any change.”

“I did, and I meant it. Tell me.”

“It’s quieter.” A breath. The kind that costs. “The bond. His heartbeat. Even after he vanished it was there — faint, like a comm signal from too far out. Now there are hours where I have to go still and hunt for it. I lose whole afternoons hunting for it.” A pause. “The doctors adjusted my medication. It isn’t the medication, Ms Knight. Torek is getting further away. Or fainter. Is there a difference?”

My hand goes to my sternum.

His heartbeat. There. Steady. Ten feet away behind a plasterboard wall, and I would know it at any distance, and I know exactly what this woman is describing because I am listening to the opposite of it.

“There’s a difference,” I say. Warm. Steady. The voice Morrison trained. “Fainter is not gone. And further away is a direction — and directions can be followed. We have a new lead, and a new tracker starting this week. The best in the sector.”

“You’ll tell me. Even if it’s bad. You’re the only one who ever wrote him down — nine months I carried this and yours is the only record that says he existed.”

“I wrote him down then and I’m writing him down now, and every entry ends the same way, lovey: open. The case is open. He is not a closed file while I’m breathing.”

The sound she makes is not a word. It is the sound of a person being heard.

Through the shared wall, I feel his heartbeat change. Xor heard — Xarthian hearing, the word quieter, the word fainter. I hear him stand. Three strides and he is behind my chair, tail around my ankle with the real grip. Not the playful tapping. The one that says I am here and I am not going silent.

I take the update. The bond-signal changes, the timing, the doctors’ notes she reads me in a voice that shakes. I write everything in the notebook — the brown cover, the worn pages, the entries stacking up beneath SNAG case 001 — and under the newest one I write the thing the notebook is for: still there. Follow the faint.

The call ends. I sit with the notebook open and the entry staring back at me.

He comes around my chair and crouches to eye level. Gold eyes. The expression that used to be clinical and is now something rawer — the face of a male who has just heard a woman describe his worst fear getting worse.

“Fainter,” he says. The word costs him.

“Fainter is not gone.”

“No. And it is a direction.” The operative and the male, both present. “He was taken — we have known that for three weeks. What we have not had is someone who can follow a cold trail through space nobody charts. The trail is going quiet, Flossie. The window is closing.”

“I know. And we need help.” I pull up the contact Morrison suggested. “We need a tracker.”

“Ex-SRS Tier 2 tracker. Freelance.” The specific flat voice. The brain retrieving a file it did not want to open. “Name.”

“Vosk. Tael Vosk.”

The tail on my ankle goes rigid.

“No.”

“You know him.”

“I know him. We overlapped at SRS for three years. He is arrogant, insubordinate, and has the operational discipline of a feral cat.”

“So you’re saying he’ll fit right in.”

“I am saying he was the only tracker who could locate a target before I could reach it, and the experience was professionally humiliating, and I am not inviting that experience into our office.”

“Lovey, the wife is dying. The bond is going silent. We need the best tracker in the sector and you just told me he’s the best tracker in the sector.”