I cannot.
I am too busy watching her lips. The way they shape each strange sound, the curve at the corner, the brief flash of white teeth. I lose track of the meaning of everything else entirely.
She holds my gaze as if she is not afraid. Her chin is tipped up, her small body braced, shoulders set. Fierce. The kind of fierceness that makes my claws itch with the urge to test it. To feel how it resists.
She waits for a response.
I remain still.
Stah-bee.
The sound lands in my mind with the weight of a thrown spear. I know all the sounds Jus-teen and Jah-kee have tried to teach us. I know all the human names.
This… is not one of them.
My thoughts tangle for a moment. Is it a warning? A command?
While I sit there, completely silent and caught, her confidence falters a little. The heat in her dark cheeks deepens. She shifts her weight from one foot to the other.
Then she lets out a breath, a small huff that makes her shoulders rise and fall. She looks away first, breaking the challenge. Shoulders stiff as she turns, grabbing a waterskin from a nearby stack, and carries it toward the storage alcove.
She does not know she has left something behind. A sound carried on her breath, now lodged in my mind.
Stah-bee.
I turn it over and over in the quiet of my thoughts, like examining the edge of a new blade. The syllables are soft but quick, her language biting them off in the front of her mouth.
A word from her mouth-speak. A word she gave only to me.
I need to understand.
I find Tharn near the cave entrance, close to the current where the desert wind presses in. Jah-kee is with him, her small hand moving over the shaft of a spear as she admires it.
“Stah-bee,” I send into the mindspace, the word itself clumsy in mind-speak.
Jah-kee’s head snaps up. “Excuse me?” she says aloud, her mouth curving in confusion.
“Mih-kay-lah,” I project, more carefully this time. “She said Stah-bee.”
Jah-kee makes a choking sound that is not quite laughter. She slides a quick look at Tharn, then back at me. Her mind-signature brightens with amusement.
“What does it mean?”
“It’s… a nickname,” she explains, voice and mind both warm.
“A neek-name,” I repeat, testing the shape of it.
“It means…” Her mouth presses together, fighting another sound. “One who is good at stabbing things.”
My ears angle forward. This is correct. I am very good at stabbing things.
I did not think she had noticed.
But there is something else in Jah-kee’s thoughts. The amusement is not mocking. There is a soft color to it. A kind of gentle heat.
“Is it…an insult?” I send, my ears flattening despite myself.
Jah-kee shakes her head quickly, head-fur—no,hair—swaying. “No. Not at all. It’s… kind of affectionate. In a Mikaela way.”
