We move again, threading through the stone as the desert closes in, shadows stretching long and sharp. The air feels tense and charged, like a held breath. The city, whatever it truly is, presses closer. It’s not as if it’s calling, how can an inanimate thingcall? But it is demanding… expecting. The sirens call pulling us forward towards the one thing we need more than any other.
Hope.
And, with my ankle useless and my pride bruised, I understand something I’ve been avoiding since the canyon. Holding strong wasn’t my mistake. The mistake was thinking I could do this alone.
Korr carries me forward, steady and unyielding, and for the first time since we left the valley, I stop telling myself this will all end cleanly. Some lines don’t get uncrossed. And some choices — once made — don’t ask permission to become permanent.
19
TALIA
The desert moves differently when you’re not walking it.
The rhythm is wrong—too smooth, too removed from effort. I feel it before I fully awake, the way my body sways without choosing to, the subtle lift and fall that doesn’t match my breath. For a moment, disorientation blurs the edges of thought.
Then awareness settles in, slow, but insistent. Korr’s arms. The rise and fall of his chest. The length of his stride. He doesn’t cradle me like something fragile. He keeps me close to his chest, one arm locked beneath my knees, the other firm around my back, weight balanced as if this were simply another configuration of movement he’s already solved.
The heat of him seeps through fabric and air. Warming my skin, pulling on my attention.
I should protest, but I don’t have the strength.
My ankle pulses in time with my heartbeat. The pain is dulled by exhaustion and epis and the simple fact that my body has reached a limit it can no longer negotiate past. Every step hetakes is careful without being hesitant. He adjusts to the terrain automatically, angles his body to shield mine from the worst of the sun.
He’s accounting for everything.
I close my eyes—not to sleep, or so I tell myself, just to rest them. Just to stop the horizon from tilting every time the ground shifts. The motion lulls despite my resistance, and my thoughts loosen their grip in spite of me. I drift.
The steady cadence of his steps reminds me of a different rhythm, one I haven’t felt in years—the faint vibration of a ship’s life support, constant and impersonal.
I’m sitting at a narrow table. Again.
Metal beneath my palms. Recycled air that carries the faintest hints of antiseptic and ozone. The light is bright and clean. Everything designed to reassure except it doesn’t.
He stands across from me, arms crossed, weight already shifted toward the door like his body knows what his mouth hasn’t said yet.
“They’re sure?” he asks.
I nod. My hands are folded too tightly in my lap. I feel it even now, half-dreaming. The pressure of trying to hold myself together by force alone.
“As sure as they can be,” I say. Calm and measured. I practiced that voice. “There are options. Other ways.”
He exhales slowly, eyes dropping to the floor. Not angry or intentionally cruel, but resolved.
“I can’t live with that,” he says.
That.
The word carries no shape, no definition, and somehow that makes it heavier. It lands between us and fractures something neither of us can quite see yet.
“It wouldn’t be like nothing,” I say, softer now. “We could still?—”
He shakes his head. Always the same gesture when he didn’t want the truth anymore.
“You don’t miss it,” he says. “Not yet.”
The accusation isn’t sharp. It’s weary. As if he’s already mourning something I haven’t been allowed to grieve.
“I would,” I whisper. “I just… need time.”
