I do not have time for pieces.
The storm line is closer. The grit in the air is already harsher.
“You are alive,” I say, forcing the words through my teeth. “That is your use to me now. Go inside.”
Wrong answer.
I know it the second I see her face. Because what I mean is simple truth. Survival first. Talk later. A living female can be argued with. A dead one is only grief and regret, and a Kai who failed his Narai before the whole rasha.
What she hears is something else. Alive is enough. Be hidden. Be the fragile thing I keep out of danger while the real people work.
Her eyes flash with hurt and anger at once. “That’s easy for you to say.”
The wind slams across the camp then, strong enough to whip the loose edge of a tent line free before one of the older boys lunges and catches it. Someone shouts. A child cries out and is instantly hushed.
I step closer, instinct taking over, blocking the worst of the wind from her with my body. “You do not argue with a glass storm.”
“I’m arguing with you.”
No. You are arguing with everything beneath it. With the women. With the horde. With Mars. With the old wound that says usefulness is the only way to belong.
I can smell it. Feel it. Cannot untangle it quickly enough to fix it.
My hand tightens once on her arm before I force it looser.
“Keandra.” Her name comes out low and hard. “Listen to me now.”
She does. That is the problem. She hears too much and the wrong things.
“You think being safe makes you small,” I say. “This storm does not care what you prove.”
Her mouth opens. Closes. Opens again. “I’m trying to be part of this place.”
“And dead females do not become part of anything.”
Again, true. Again, wrong in the way it lands.
She wrenches her arm once, not enough to break my hold, enough to show she wants the freedom. “You always say it like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like I’m one mistake from needing to be put away somewhere.”
The words hit me like a strike. Because now I hear the whole shape of it. Not only fear of being useless. Fear of being handled. Put aside. Managed. Kept safe in the way people keep breakable things on shelves and call that kindness.
The instinctive answer in me is to close in harder. Hold her face still. Make her look at the storm. Make her understand what cuts flesh and blinds eyes and strips skin from the unprepared. Make her understand that I would burn half the plains before letting that wind touch her.
Instead, I let go of her arm.
That is the second hard choice.
I step back half a pace and point toward my tent. “Go there.”
Not because I am dismissing her. Because if I touch her again right now, I will shake sense into her like a Tor, and that is not how a husband should handle this wound, even with a storm coming.
Keandra stares at me as if the released grip proves the wrong thing all over again. I can almost see the thought forming. Fine. Go. Be safe. Be out of the way.
The camp is louder now. The storm is closer. Dust hissing over stretched hide and stone. This conversation has no time left for subtlety.
