"Step where you step. Got it." She glances at my legs, then at her own. "Your stride is about three of mine, so you'll need to adjust."
"I'll adjust."
"And if the predators follow us?"
"They will. The question is whether they commit." I check the entrance. Two of the pack have settled into resting positions, conserving energy. The others have faded back into the undergrowth, which means they're repositioning for a pursuit they expect. "If they press, I deal with it. You keep moving."
"What does 'deal with it' look like for you?"
A question most beings wouldn't ask, because the answer is obvious. But she's watching me without the flinch I'm accustomed to, so I answer plainly. "I was trained for combat for the arena years. The pack doesn't want the confrontation that comes with pressing."
"Decades as property," she says softly, and something shifts behind her eyes. Not pity. Something closer to anger, directed outward, not at me but at whatever put years of imprisonment of violence into those two words. She doesn't ask more. Doesn't push for the story behind the number.
She files it away. I can see her doing it, tucking the information into whatever mental architecture she uses to make sense of the world. She'll come back to it. Not now. Later, when she's decided I've earned the asking.
Good. I'm not ready to answer.
"Rest," I tell her again. "I'll watch."
This time she listens. Her body relaxes fractionally against mine, the adrenaline finally releasing its hold. Her breathing slows, deepens, takes on the rhythm of someone surrendering to exhaustion against their better judgment. She doesn't curl against me so much as collapse, her weight settling into the angle between my chest and the cave wall, her head tipping against my shoulder.
She falls asleep in under two minutes. Pressed against a fugitive gladiator in a hole in the ground, with predators outside and prison drones overhead, and she falls asleep like it's the safest place she's been all day.
Either she's profoundly foolish or she reads people better than anyone I've encountered in decades in chains of captivity.
I don't move. I watch the entrance, track the predators' positions, listen for the drone engines that will tell me whether the search has widened or contracted. Standard survival protocol. The same watchfulness that has kept me alive since I crawled out of the wreckage of my transport ship and into a jungle that wanted me dead.
But my arm has settled around her shoulders. Not a conscious decision; my body made it while my tactical mind was occupied. She's cold, or at least colder than me, andthe reflex to shelter something small and vulnerable is older than anything ApexCorp ever trained into me. Older than the arenas, older than the facility, older than the the captivity years of conditioning that should have killed every instinct except violence.
The jade markings on my forearm glow faintly beneath the dead blue of the traceries. Warmer than they've been in months. Responding to something my conscious mind refuses to name.
Dawn is hours away. When it comes, we run for the canyon, and every decision I've made in the last hour either saves us or kills us. Three kilometres of hostile terrain with a human who can't match my speed, my strength, or my silence, and who will need all three to survive what's between us and the only defensible position in this sector.
I should be calculating contingencies. Cataloguing her limitations. Planning for the likely scenario where she slows me down enough to get us both caught.
Instead, I am listening to her breathe, and the sound is the closest thing to peace I have heard in decades of captivity.
I close that thought down. Lock it away where it can't compromise my judgment. The courier is a tactical asset and a tactical liability. She represents a possible route to communication, to rescue, to something other than dying alone in a jungle. That's all she is.
The jade markings pulse once, warm, and go dim.
I am a very good liar. Even to myself.
3
What the Wreckage Keeps
Krilly
Thejunglewakesupscreaming.
My body jolts against Horgox's chest before my brain catches up, and for two disoriented seconds I have no idea where I am. Roots. Soil. The smell of wet vegetation and something mineral-sharp. Then the rest floods back: the crash, the predators, the root cave, a Varkaani gladiator's arm around my shoulders and the steady rhythm of his breathing that apparently lulled me to sleep like some kind of oversized, emerald-skinned white noise machine.
"Dawn chorus." His voice vibrates through his ribcage where my cheek is still pressed. "Territorial calls. Not a threat."
"Could've fooled me." My neck has a permanent crick. My legs are numb from the roots. Something with too many legs is exploring the vicinity of my left boot, and I decide that ignorance is bliss on that particular front. The sensible thing would be to pull away from the heat of him, put professional distance between myself and the fugitive I'm inexplicably cuddled against.
The sensible thing and the warm thing are at odds, and I'm stiff and cold and human.
