Her breath caught. Barely audible. I heard it anyway.
She pulled back, and I felt the loss like a cold spot on my hand.
“The eastern tree line,” she said. Her voice was steady, but I’d heard the catch. I’d felt the way her fingers had pressed back against mine for just a moment before she retreated. “They came from there last night, but they bunched up at the fence. If we add a secondary trap line about thirty meters back, we can catch them before they reach cover.”
I forced myself to consider her suggestion. Forced my mind onto tactics, terrain, the geometry of killing.
She was right. The fence had created a natural chokepoint, but a determined force could adapt. A secondary line would make them slow down, reconsider.
“We’d need to mine the approach carefully. Make it look passable.”
“I know where the ground is soft.” She unwrapped a bundle she’d brought. Bread, dried meat, preserved fruit. Her hands moved with the same efficiency she brought to everything. “Where they’d naturally step to avoid leaving tracks.”
Of course she did. She’d walked this land for years. Known every dip and rise, every patch of treacherous soil.
I drank the tea. Hot and bitter, cut with something sweet I didn’t recognize. Simple. Good.
She was still crouched beside me. Near enough that I could see the fine hairs at the nape of her neck. Close enough that if I leaned forward, I could press my mouth to the curve where her shoulder met her throat.
I stayed still. Drank my tea. Didn’t lean.
“Eat something,” she said. “Then we’ll lay the new line.”
I ate. Not because I was hungry, but because she’d brought it for me. Because she’d thought about me this morning while I was out here thinking about her.
We workedside by side for two hours.
I’d worked alone for most of my life. Preferred it. The silence, the control, the certainty that no one would get in my way or slow me down. Even with the team, I operated at the edges, coming and going like smoke.
This was different.
She anticipated me. Handed me sensors before I reached for them. Held wiring steady without being asked. Moved when I needed space and stayed when I needed an anchor.
“You telegraph,” she said, not looking up from the connection she was securing. “Your shoulders shift before you reach for something.”
She’d been watching me that closely. Learning my movements the way I’d learned hers.
I watched her hands as she worked. The competence in them. The sureness. She twisted wires together with practiced ease, fingers moving in patterns Torek must have taught her.
“You knew what I needed,” I said.
“Observant.” She still didn’t look up. “It’s how I’ve survived this long.”
“It’s more than that.”
Now she looked up. Her green eyes found mine, and something passed between us. Something that had nothing to do with sensors or wiring or the trap line we were building.
“You’re different,” she said. “When you’re working. Calmer. Like the rest of the world goes quiet.”
“It does.”
“Must be nice.”
“It has its uses.”
I didn’t tell her that the world wasn’t quiet anymore. That she was in it now, a constant hum at the edge of my awareness, and no amount of focus could make her fade into the background.
She held out the last sensor. I reached for it.
