Page 92 of Fought and Found

"Sprout. Log it."

"Logged. First case: recovering a lost heartbeat." The orb glows amber, and underneath the warmth there is something with edges. "Engines warm at first light."

Her head settles back onto my chest. Her pulse in my sternum — steady, certain, home. Neither of us pretends we are going back to sleep.

Somewhere in the Reach, a heartbeat has gone missing, and someone with a long reach and identical sentences made sure nobody heard it stop. Someone who has done this more than once.

They were not counting on the two of us.

We are going to find it.

Epilogue: If It's Missing

Flossie

Threeweekslater,thesign goes up.

SNAG RECOVERY SERVICES. Hand-painted. Slightly crooked. Xor offered to install it precisely. I overruled him because precision is not the point — the point is that it was painted by a woman who names her weapons and a male who still calls fairy lights a navigational hazard and the crooked part is ours.

Unit 7, Finder’s Market, Level 2. Morrison’s floor plan, realized. Two offices — his with sight lines to the door and mine with a tea station that could supply a small army. A client intake area with the comfortable chairs Sprout requisitioned (“reinforced, as recommended”) and the fairy lights I strung across the ceiling while Xor stoodbehind me holding the ladder and radiating disapproval and arousal in equal measure.

The arousal has not diminished. Three weeks of sharing a berth and an office and a life, and his body still responds to mine like a navigational system locking onto a beacon. I know because I can feel it — his heartbeat in my sternum, the permanent biological link that quickens when I walk into a room and steadies when I sit beside him. His pulse when he sees me in the morning with sleep-mussed hair and his shirt and nothing else. His pulse when I lean over the desk to reach a data pad and the claiming mark at my throat catches the light.

This morning it caught the light while I was briefing him on the Brax diagnostic windows, and he crossed both offices without one word, put his mouth over the mark until my knees forgot their assignment, and went back to his desk. “Continue,” he said. I did not continue for some time.

The mark. Visible. Always visible. I wear open collars now — not because he asked, because he would never ask, because the arrogant possessive alien who cataloged my scent at three feet and wrapped his tail around my waist in a public corridor has never once suggested I should display his mark. I display it because I want to. Because the scar is mine. Because Junction One knows Flossie Knight has been claimed by a Xarthian and the knowing does not diminish me. The knowing is power.

He is in his office. I can hear him — the low voice on a comm channel, the clipped precision of a male who runs tactical assessments the way other people breathe. He has been coordinating with Morrison’s intelligence feeds, cross-referencing my notebook entries with operational data, building the case files that SNAG will use to findthe things nobody else is looking for. He is very good at this. The competence is, three weeks in, still doing things to me.

His tail taps the wall.

I hear it from my side — a soft, rhythmic thud against the shared partition. Tap. Tap. Tap-tap. The sound of three and a half feet of prehensile muscle that wants to reach me and cannot because there is a wall in the way and the wall is not cooperating. The tail has its own agenda and the agenda is my ankle and the wall is an obstacle the tail has not accepted.

He doesn’t know he’s doing it. Or he does know and won’t admit it. Either way, the tapping has become a morning ritual — I sit at my desk, he sits at his, and within five minutes the tail starts knocking on the shared wall like a cat pawing at a closed door. The most lethal operative in the sector and his tail is tapping on a wall because it misses me. We are ten feet apart.

There is a perfectly serviceable connecting doorway three meters to the tail’s left. The tail does not accept detours. The tail holds a position of principle on the matter of walls.

I press my palm flat to the wall. My side. Where the tapping is.

The tapping stops. A pause — two seconds, three. Then a slower tap. Once. The prehensile tip pressing flat against his side of the wall directly behind my palm. I can almost feel the warmth through the partition. Almost.

“That wall,” I tell nobody in particular, “is going to have to come down.”

“I have architectural recommendations prepared,” Sprout says. “The structural modification would improve inter-office communication flow. Also: the wall is suffering. I have logged fourteen incidentsof tail-related impact in three weeks. The plasterboard has feelings, Flossie. Somebody should advocate for the plasterboard.”

I take my hand off the wall. The tapping resumes immediately. Tap-tap. Tap. Needy. Rhythmic. The Tier 1 operative’s involuntary confession that ten feet of wall between us is ten feet too many.

I am in so much trouble with this man.

“Your heart rate has elevated,” Sprout announces from the ceiling. “Shall I inform Xor that his tactical approach is successful, or shall I allow you to maintain the fiction that you are unaffected?”

“Neither. Process the Morrison intelligence packet.”

“Processing. I note that the intelligence packet has been ready for eleven minutes and you have been listening to the tapping for nine of them. I am logging this under ‘operational efficiency: compromised by pair-bonding.’”

“Log whatever you want, Sprout.”

“I always do. For posterity.”