To be fair, it wasn’t thatshewas especially unathletic, but rather that I spent my time around espers. Compared to them, even most professional athletes would fall short.
Yun tripped, nearly face-planting into the dirt, catching herself a heartbeat before.
So, perhaps she was a bit worse than the other guides.
“What is this? Humiliation hour?” Carter plopped down on the bench beside me. “Why have guides running around like that?”
“They’re acknowledging that guides are in more danger now, so they want to train their bodies as well. The Guild has started basic combat and self-defense in the past year.”
“What are they going to learn in the little bit of time before The Pitt opens?”
I flinched as Yun hit her shin on a piece of equipment she’d tried to hop over. “Unofficially, I think they’re trying to keep guides and espers busy. Busy people cause fewer problems, and as we near the opening of the dungeon, tensions run higher.”
“I have a feeling her throwing herself around like this isn’t going to put her in a better mood.” Carter sighed, as though he could already tell she’d be frustrated by the time this evening came. Kenyon could heal any scrapes or bruises, but her overallmood? That was more difficult to direct, and it hadn’t exactly been stable even at the best of times.
“She keeps putting up walls,” I said.
“She didn’t have that many yesterday.” Carter smirked, and the waves of lust that poured off him said he was recalling what had happened when she’d woken.
And, yes, I could admit it was a fond memory.
“She seems to be accepting our touch, but that isn’t the same thing. She’s still holding herself back. We know what happened to her to some extent, but she hasn’t fully spoken about what she went through. She still has nightmares unless we try to stop them, and she still panics, but she doesn’t speak about it.”
“So what? She’s probably just not anall in my feelingssort of person. I say we count our blessings about that, because I don’t want to end up with a guide who cries all the time.”
“You don’t understand. People connect through shared experience, and that can include discussing traumas. By her not doing that, she’s creating a divide on purpose. She’s intentionally locking us out of that part of her past.”
“What do you know about what people do?” The way he said it made his meaning clear.
I wasn’tpeople.I wasn’t normal.
That might have hurt me if he wasn’t right about it.
“I might not experience those same things myself, but I’ve spent enough time in people’s minds to understand them. Trust me—if she doesn’t come out and talk about it, it will explode.” I paused, then added on even if I knew he’d hate me saying it, “And the same can be said about our own trauma.”
“We don’t have trauma. We have dark backstories. There’s a difference.”
“What is the difference?”
“Dark backstories make us mysterious and sexy. Trauma makes us sound pathetic.”
“Well, no matter what you call it, if we want her to be honest, perhaps we should speak up first.”
“Oh, like fuck am I going into that bullshit. Besides, it isn’t like she doesn’t have a pretty good idea already. People gossip like fourteen-year-old girls, so I’m sure someone’s spilled on that.”
“She may know the official story, but she doesn’t know the truth.”
“What does the truth matter? You know as well as I do that the truth is all bullshit. Besides, why would she even believe us? No one else ever has. No, it’s better to let her think whatever she wants about it, because no matter what happened, we’re still exactly who we are.”
“So you aren’t even curious about her past?”
“I wouldn’t saythat.I’ve certainly considered ensuring whoever put that fear into her was torn into tiny little shreds, but I have a feeling that isn’t possible. If Yun is here—however it happened—there’s no way the corrupted that did that to her could be alive. I don’t like that I don’t know, but I’m also smart enough to realize pushing is only going to cause her to pull back, and that’s the last thing we want. We’ve got years, Shear, so we’ve got time. She’ll come out with it when she wants to. Until then? We have to wait.”
I sighed, knowing better than to argue with Carter. He was as hardheaded as people came, and there was no way to convince him once he made up his mind. He was steady at his core, convinced that he was right, and it took a natural disaster to get him to move a bit.
Of course, looking at Yun, I wondered if she wasn’t our force of nature, if she wasn’t the disaster that would shake up our world.
She had already, hadn’t she? We had connected with her in a way we had never experienced before, and so quickly she had become a part of a group that had stood strong for so many years. She’d torn into our squad and formed a place for herself,and now I could no longer picture a future that didn’t include her.
