TWENTY-THREE
TANITH
Three days pass before my body stops betraying me.
Three days of forcing myself upright when every muscle screams to stay horizontal. Three days of testing my power in small bursts—ending minor spells, collapsing weak frameworks—and feeling the cost diminish incrementally. Three days of watching Arax watch me with an intensity that borders on surveillance.
He thinks I don’t notice.
He’s wrong.
The shelter has becomeits own small world. Stone walls that block the Reach’s gray light. A cooking fire that Arax maintains with mechanical precision despite not needing food himself. Two bedrolls separated by exactly four feet of space—a distance he maintains as if it were law, even when he positions himself between me and the entrance every night.
I’ve been tracking his behaviors the way I’d track ritual patterns. The data tells a story he hasn’t voiced.
His hands, for instance. When I first woke after the engine collapse, the skin across his knuckles was pink and raw—newly healed, obviously damaged. He offered no explanation. I didn’t ask. But I’ve seen him flex those hands when he thinks I’m sleeping, testing their restored function with the careful attention of someone assessing a weapon’s reliability after repair.
He broke his hands on purpose. I’m certain of it now. The question is why.
On the fourth morning,I corner him.
“Tell me about the wall.”
Arax goes still. Not the watchful pause of a predator assessing threat—the deeper freeze of someone caught in a lie they didn’t technically tell.
“The wall.” His tone holds its usual flatness, but weeks of proximity have taught me to hear the variations underneath. This particular flatness is deliberate. Defensive.
“The one you punched until your hands were destroyed.” I gesture toward the stone behind him, where faint discoloration marks the surface. Scrubbed clean of blood, but the staining remains if you know where to look. “I’m not stupid, Arax. And I’m not blind.”
Silence stretches between us. The fire crackles, throwing shadows across his face that make his expression impossible to read—not that his expression ever gives much away. After fifteen seconds that feel like fifteen minutes, he speaks.
“I required focus.”
“Focus.”
“Yes.”
“You beat your hands against stone until bone showed through because you requiredfocus.”
Another pause. When he answers, his voice has deepened, gone rough. “The alternative was unacceptable.”
The words hang in the stale air of the shelter. I turn them over, examining them from different angles—the same analysis I’d apply to a suspect ritual component. The alternative. What alternative requires self-destruction to avoid?
Understanding arrives with the force of a physical blow.
“You wanted to mate me.”
Arax doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t look away. Doesn’t offer denial or deflection or any of the evasions I half-expected. He simply meets my eyes with the void-touched gaze that once terrified me and now produces a response far more complicated.
“Yes.”
One word. Absolute. No qualification, no context, no attempt to soften the admission.
“I was unconscious.”
“Yes.”
“So you punched a wall instead.”
