For one suspended second, the space between us becomes the most important thing in the transport.
I lower my hand slowly. Another discipline.
“You should use the shoulder restraint,” I say instead.
She glances at the strap beside her seat as if she did not realize what it was for. Human city transports use different harness systems. Of course she did not know.
Without a word, I reach for my own restraint and fasten it across my chest first.
Then I wait.
Understanding crosses her face. Not full ease. But enough.
She fastens hers.
Good.
I settle back, though my blood is too warm from nearly touching her. Not because the touch would have been wrong. Because it would have been too easy to keep going once I felt her.
That thought alone is enough to tighten my jaw again.
My wife.
The last of the city falls behind us. The road opens. Sky stretches wider above the transport roof. Grasslands roll out in long gold-green reaches broken by darker brush and stone. Wind strikes the sides harder now. The sun lowers toward late day.
This is better. This is ground I understand.
As the transport leaves the capital fully, something in me eases for the first time since entering the government building. Not because the hunger is less. Because the road ahead leads only toward home.
I watch Keandra watch the world. Her eyes move over everything. The breadth of the land. The changing light. The sheer open size of it. Fear is in her. I can scent it. But alongside it now is something else. Wonder, maybe. Or shock softening into attention.
Good. Let the land begin working on her. Let the air do what city walls could not. Let her see that my world is not only law and pressure and the expectation of children. It is real ground. Realsky. Real weather. Real life outside hunger and corridors and locked doors.
I want her under that sky with my scent on her.
The thought hits so hard I almost shut my eyes against it.
Not yet. Soon. But not yet.
For now, I watch. I keep the ride smooth. Keep my warriors forward and silent. Keep every eye and instinct fixed on the female across from me.
The papers in the office made the marriage legal. This road is making it real. Because with every mile between the capital and Vek Talan, she leaves one world farther behind and comes deeper into mine.
Chapter 11
Keandra
The farther we get from the capital, the less Tigris feels like a city and the more it feels like a living thing.
I keep my eyes on the window because it is easier than looking too long at Kaiven, and because every few minutes something outside changes enough to pull my attention back. The roads narrow first. The carved stone edges disappear. The ordered fields and neat compounds thin out. Then the land opens all at once, and my breath catches so sharply I have to stop myself from making a sound.
It is enormous.
Mars always felt crowded, even in the poor districts where space was rationed and ugly and never really yours. Even the open places there had limits. Fences. Domes. Work lines. Transport lanes. Here, nothing looks held in by human hands.
The land rolls out in long wide stretches of gold grass broken by darker brush, scattered stone, and lines of trees bending in the wind. The sky feels too large for me to understand properly. It keeps going and going, blue deepening toward the horizon, pale clouds stretched thin above the plains.
I did not know land could look this open and still feel dangerous. That is the part that unsettles me most. It is beautiful. I can admit that to myself. More beautiful than anything I imagined while starving in my room on Mars. But it is not soft beauty. Not safe beauty. There is something hard under all of it. The kind of beauty that would not care if I lived or died crossing it.
