My throat tightened so fast I had to breathe through it. “I know you won’t.”
I turned to Nocrez.
He’d been blinking hard for several minutes—fighting the tears with everything he had, jaw set with that stubborn Aldawi refusal to cry when he’d decided he wasn’t going to cry. At his name, he went very still and his eyes fixed on my face.
“Nocrez. You’re the Heart.”
“Your clanfathers will push themselves,” I said. “They’ll say they’re fine when they’re not. They’ll skip meals because they’ve been focused on something that felt more urgent. They’ll stay up half the night doing work that could wait and then be surprised when their bodies protest.” I let it sit for a moment. “V’dim isn’t here. V’dim is the one who usually notices these things and refuses to let anyone pretend they’re fine when they’re clearly not fine. That’s your job now. You make sure they eat—actual meals, not something grabbed standing up. You make sure they rest. If one of them collapses because no one noticed they’d been awake for two days straight, that is a failure of the mission. Your mission.”
One tear escaped before he could stop it. He caught it with the back of his paw immediately, jaw tightening in pure Nocrez fashion—embarrassed by the tear, determined about the rest.
“I’ll take care of them,” he said. The words came out fierce, more fierce than the soft careful way Nocrez usually spoke. “I promise, Mama. Clanfather Xylo will eat even if I have to sit across from him and stare until he does.”
“He will absolutely try to wait you out,” I told him. “He’ll say he’ll eat in a moment and then get distracted by something that needs his attention. Do not let him.”
Something that was almost a laugh cracked across Nocrez’s face—too many feelings layered behind it to fully become one—but it broke through anyway, brief and real. “He can’t wait longer than me.”
I believed that entirely.
Meti hadn’t moved. She was still in my lap, still holding my hand, still facing the yard with that observing stillness. Waiting—the specific way she waited for things she’d already prepared for, giving me the space to arrive at what she already knew.
“Meti.”
“Yes, Mama.”
“You’re the Eye.”
She turned in my lap then, fully, so she was facing me. Up close, in the amber afternoon light, the silver of her fur caught and held it, and those dark amethyst eyes looked at me with the quality of attention that had been unsettling people twice her age since she was small enough to carry. Measuring. Calm. Already two steps ahead.
“You see things the others miss,” I said. “You always have. You sense things before they announce themselves—before they have a shape, before they have a name. That isn’t something I can give Neazzos or Nocrez. It’s yours.” I held her gaze. Did not look away, because looking away from Meti when you were trying to tell her something important was a mistake—she noticed and noted it and then waited for you to try again. “If something feels wrong—not just looks wrong, not just sounds wrong, but feels wrong in that specific way that only you can feel—you don’t wait to be sure. You don’t second-guess it. You don’t decide it’s probably nothing. You go to Clanfather Xylo or Clanfather Odelm immediately and you tell them. That is the most important job in this house. Do you understand why?”
She was quiet for a moment. “Because by the time it has a shape,” she said, “it’s already too late to move easily.”
Something moved through my chest—not surprise, exactly. I’d stopped being surprised by Meti a long time ago. But it hitme sideways anyway. I was handing her a real responsibility, and she’d understood it instantly and completely and named the exact principle underneath it.
“Yes,” I said. “Exactly that.”
She nodded once. Slow. Settled. “Then I understand.”
“Good.”
She nodded once more, settled, and turned back toward the yard—conversation closed behind her the way conversations with Meti always closed. Finished when she was finished, not a breath sooner.
Below, the training had finally stopped.
The three males stood in loose formation—no signal, just the particular stillness of people who’d arrived at the same threshold simultaneously. Kaede with his psydagger at neutral, his drones settling into dormant positions overhead. Ryzen with his daggers resting quiet in their orbit, the tension that had driven him all afternoon spent, used up in something purposeful. And Zyxel, leaning back against the yard’s low wall, long black hair damp, chartreuse eyes still moving across the space with that last automatic assessing sweep before he let himself rest.
Through the crimson thread—warm, exhausted, satisfied—I felt him look up.
I felt Kaede’s neon-green thread do the same thing a half-second later. He found my gaze across the distance and held it, and through our bond I felt what lived underneath his controlled face: that particular warmth he never wore on his exterior, the one that ran deeper than pride. He’d built something today in that yard. Something rough and functional and genuinely his, shared between three males who had no particular reason to trust each other.
He was satisfied.
I held his gaze for a breath. Let him see that I saw it.
Then Neazzos spotted them moving toward the villa entrance.
“They’re coming up—”
