“Because that’s the job. You were behind me. Nothing gets through.”
Something moves in her face. She doesn’t push it. Let it sit. Good. Because I cannot explain it yet.
She bandages my arms. I sit against the cargo bay wall, and she kneels beside me, and her hands are steady, and her tongue is between her teeth. I have seen no one calm down that fast after a Vrennak. Seen no one hold a Vrennak’s gaze with their voice — not a keeper, not a handler, not a veteran with twenty years on the route. Never heard of it. The thing she did is not in any manual I’ve read. And I have read all of them.
I am going to keep her.
The thought again. Clearer. The hunting instinct is fully online and quietly rearranging the furniture of my interior life. Picking thingsup. Putting them down in different places. Making room for something that was not there this morning.
Here is the thing I do not tell her: the slash on my forearm is already closing. The wound she is so carefully cleaning will be half-healed by morning — the hunt-bond running hot, my body redirecting everything it has toward staying combat-ready. The claw marks will scar, but the bleeding has already slowed more than it should.
I do not mention this. Her hands are on my skin. Warm. Careful. Steady. Her thumb crosses the first ridge, and I lock my jaw. She notices the lock — of course she does — and her hands slow for half a second and then resume, and neither of us says a word. The second ridge. My breathing stops. The third. My vision narrows to where her thumb meets my skin, and the sensation rewrites something at the root of my nervous system. Forty-one years of inert ridges coming online at once, and the calibration target is a female with gauze and an antiseptic pad and a tongue between her teeth.
“Sorry, did I hurt you?”
“No. You didn’t hurt me.”
She can hear the crack in my voice. She pauses. Searches my face. I hold still.
She finishes. Tapes the gauze. Her hands stay on my forearm a beat longer than necessary.
“We did well,” she says.
We.She keeps sayingwe.Including me in her courage as if it’s obvious. She doesn’t know what that word does to a male who has been solitary for forty-one years and just found out why.
“Captain,” HORATIO. The tone he uses when he’s about to say something I won’t enjoy. “The medical appointment at Junction One has been re-added to your calendar.”
The appointment. Reproductive endocrinology. The next round of tests to confirm what every previous round has confirmed: dormant instinct, non-responsive hunt-bond, functionally defective.
“Delete it, HORATIO.”
“Captain. Of course.” The precise pause he uses when he’s being unbearable on purpose. “May I observe that you have not, in fact, required the appointment for some hours now.”
The hold is silent.
“HORATIO.”
“Withdrawing, Captain.”
The pod won’t take it. The cradle is built to seal a live signature into stasis, not to coffin a body, and the housing keeps trying to read a biosignature that isn’t there anymore and stalling. HORATIO solves it the way he solves everything, quietly and without being asked: a standard cargo container, hauled out from the storage bank, lined and sealed for biological transport. The thing weighs as much as I do. I get my arms under it and lift, and the wrongness of the texture comes through the gauze, and I do not let it show on my face.
She gets the container lid. She doesn’t have to — she has a head wound and a hip that’s going to be black by morning — but she’s there, steadying the edge while I lower the weight in, and her hands are careful, and she is quiet, and her mouth is set in a line that isn’t disgust.
“It didn’t get to find it,” she says. Not a question. She’s looking at the dark shape settling into the liner. “Whatever it was looking for. It died still looking.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s the worst part.” She seals the latch. Her voice doesn’t wobble; it just lands flat and certain, as if she knows the shape of it from the inside. “Not the dying. The still-looking.”
I have nothing to put on top of that. I don’t try. The container clicks shut and the manifest line resolves on HORATIO’s feed —one (1) specimen, deceased, modified, origin unknown— and that is the sum of it, filed and sealed and nothing more to do with it until the bay doors open in twenty-two hours.
She doesn’t ask. She sips the water pouch, and she doesn’t ask, and the not-asking is kindness. I am going to remember that she did this.
6
So Much Trouble
Jazil
