"Two bites."
She looked at him sidelong. "You can't possibly know that."
"You were not hungry when you arrived and you were distracted when you left. People do not eat well in either of those conditions."
She looked back at the window. "That is an annoyingly accurate observation."
"I have made a number of them. You have yet to thank me for most of them."
She turned to look at him fully, because something in his voice was different — not warmer exactly, but less careful. Less managed. She wasn't sure she'd heard that before.
"Was that a joke?" she said.
He considered this with apparent seriousness. "It may have been an attempt at one."
"How was it?"
"I am uncertain. You did not laugh."
"I'm smiling," she said. "That counts."
He looked at her for a moment. "Yes," he said. "I suppose it does."
She ate the food he made — something simple, assembled from what she had, which wasn't much — and they sat at opposite ends of her small table and talked in a way they hadn't talked before. Not the careful negotiations of the first days, not the professional distance of the archive and the party. Something easier. Something that had been building without her noticing and had arrived while she was looking at the dock district from her window.
She asked him about the Collective. Not the politics of it, not the Prophet Mothers or the prophecy — she'd had enough of those things for one evening. She asked him what it was like to grow up there. What he remembered.
He was quiet long enough that she thought he wouldn't answer.
"It was cold," he said finally. "The deep parts. The older sections where the children learned. We were not supposed to mind the cold." A pause. "I minded it considerably."
"Did you tell anyone?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because you did not," he said simply. "That was simply how things were. You did not speak of discomfort. You learned to carry it quietly." He looked at the table for a moment. "I was perhaps eight years old before I understood that carrying something quietly was not the same as it not being there."
She thought about that. About a child in a cold stone passage learning the difference between endurance and erasure. "Who taught you that?"
"Kra-May." Something shifted in his face — not quite a smile, but adjacent to one. "He was not supposed to. It was not part of the curriculum. He told me anyway."
"He sounds like someone worth knowing."
"He is." He met her eyes briefly. "He believed you were worth protecting before the council agreed to protect you. That is not a small thing, among my people."
She held that carefully. Kra-May, who she had never met, who was still in the Chancellor's household doing whatever quiet work needed doing, who had told a child in a cold passage that it was acceptable to notice what hurt.
"Tell me something else," she said.
He looked at her. "What do you want to know?"
"Anything you're willing to tell me. Something true."
A silence. Not reluctant — thoughtful. The silence of someone deciding not what they were permitted to say but what they wanted to.
"When I was twelve," he said, "I found a section of the ruins that no one else had mapped. Deep in the oldest part of the Collective, behind a passage that looked like a dead end but wasn't. There was a room. Very small. The walls had markings on them — not Fraluma script, something older, something none of our scholars could identify. I went back seventeen times before I told anyone it existed."
