"Non-negotiable. The canyon is defensible. The crash site is not."
She wants to argue. I can see it in the set of her jaw, the way her fingers tighten against my forearm. But she reads the situation accurately, because underneath the reckless optimism, the courier has a tactical mind that's sharper than she lets on.
"Fine. Canyon first, Bebo second." A pause. "But we're going back for him."
It's not a question. I note this and file it alongside everything else I'm learning about Krilly Baxter: she doesn't abandon what's hers.
"Rest while you can," I tell her. "The hour won't last."
She doesn't close her eyes. Instead, she watches the predators through the roots, tracking their movements with a focus that surprises me. Her hand is still resting on my forearm, fingers settled against the geometric markings where they shift colour beneath the hard blue lines of the traceries. She doesn't seem aware she's touching me. Or perhaps she does, and it simply doesn't trouble her.
It troubles me. Not the contact itself, but how my body responds to it. Varkaani markings shift colour with emotion, a biological communication system as involuntary as a human blush. Mine have been dim for years, suppressed byconditioning and the chemical dampeners ApexCorp used to keep their gladiators controllable. Three months without the dampeners, and the colours are returning. Inconvenient, when a stranger's fingers on my skin make the jade deepen to something warmer.
I control it. I've controlled far worse.
"You're tense," she observes, still watching the predators. "More than the situation warrants, I mean. You've been surviving this jungle for three months; the predators and drones aren't new. So something else is making you rigid."
Observant. Dangerously observant.
"Three months alone. Adjustment takes time."
"Mmm." She doesn't buy it, but she lets it go. Her fingers shift against my forearm, unconscious, tracing the edge where a circuit tracery crosses a natural marking. "These are different, aren't they? The blue lines and the green patterns. The green ones are yours. The blue ones are… not."
My chest tightens. She's sorted it out in minutes, the distinction that most beings never notice. The jade markings are Varkaani. Mine from birth, coded to my emotional state, part of who I am. The blue circuit traceries are ApexCorp. Grafted on. Engineered into my nervous system for monitoring and control, repurposed after I ripped out the kill-switch components during my escape. They glow cold where the jade glows warm, and they will never shift colour because they were never alive.
"Yes," I say. Nothing more.
She nods, as though this confirms something she'd already guessed. Then her hand flattens against my forearm, palm over the widest band of jade, and holds there. Deliberate now. Not accidental contact; a choice.
"I fix things," she says quietly. "Tech, systems, broken equipment. It's what I do." Her eyes find mine. "I can't fix what they did to you. But I want you to know that I see the difference."
Forty years. Forty years since anyone touched me without intent to harm, restrain, or modify. Years as a weapon since anyone looked at what ApexCorp made of me and saw something underneath worth acknowledging.
I don't trust her. I can't; trust is a luxury I lost at eighty years old in a facility that smelled like antiseptic and sounded like screaming. But her hand is warm on my arm, and the jade markings beneath her palm respond despite everything I do to suppress them, and for the first time in three months I am aware of how profoundly alone I have been.
"We should discuss route options," I say, because the alternative is saying something I cannot take back.
"Sure." She pulls her hand away, and the loss of contact registers as a cold spot on my skin. "Route options. Practical. I can do practical."
The predators circle. The drones sweep the distant crash site. Rain hammers the jungle canopy above, purple and acidic and relentless.
I outline the approach to the canyon: northwest through dense undergrowth for the first kilometre, skirting the territorial boundary of a larger predator species that will keep the pack at a distance; then east through a stream bed where running water masks scent and thermal signatures; then a scramble up a rock face to the canyon mouth. Terrain I've navigated alone, at speed, in the dark. With the courier, it will take three times as long and make ten times the noise.
She listens with the focus of someone accustomed to processing technical briefings under pressure. Asks two questions, both tactical, both relevant. Doesn't waste time on hypotheticals or reassurances.
"The stream bed," she says. "How deep?"
"Knee-height on me. Chest-height on you."
"Great. Love a good wade through alien water on a planet where the rain is acidic." She pauses. "Is the stream acidic?"
"Mineral-filtered through basalt. Neutral pH. I've been drinking it for three months."
"One piece of good news. I'll take it." She exhales slowly, then squares her shoulders in the confined space. "Okay. Three kilometres, hostile jungle, predator escort, possible drone contact. Worst delivery route I've ever run, but not by as much as you'd think."
She says it with the casual gallows humour of someone who means it. OOPS couriers, from what little I know, don't survive by being cautious. They survive by being stubborn and resourceful and slightly unhinged, and this one is all three.
"When we move," I say, "stay behind me. Step where I step. If I go still, you go still. The jungle tracks motion and heat; if we move with the canopy rhythms instead of against them, we buy seconds. Seconds matter out here."
