“I think it’s coming,” she says, and then her voice tightens just enough to give away what she’s been holding back. “My village is in their path.”
There it is, the real reason beneath everything else. I exhale slowly, letting that settle into the calculation rather than reacting to it. “Then it will be evacuated.”
Her expression doesn’t change. “No, it won’t.”
“Yes, it will.”
“No,” she repeats, more firmly this time. “It won’t.”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Because they don’t evacuate villages,” she says. “They replace them. They let them fall, then pull from somewhere else.”
I don’t like hearing that out loud, especially from her, and I don’t like that I can’t immediately argue it without lying. “You’re assuming the worst.”
“I’m recognizing the pattern.”
I study her, really study her, and see the shift that’s happened since the garden. She isn’t reacting anymore; she’s thinking, mapping, connecting things she shouldn’t have access to and turning them into something coherent.
“You want me to act,” I say.
“Yes.”
“On behalf of a human village.”
“Yes.”
I huff a quiet breath, running my tongue along the back of my teeth as I consider the weight of that. “You understand what that looks like.”
“I don’t care what it looks like.”
“I do.”
“Of course you do,” she says, frustration creeping back in. “Because everything here is about how it looks.”
“That’s not entirely wrong,” I admit, which throws her off for half a second. “But it’s not the whole of it either.”
“Then explain it,” she says.
I hesitate, because explaining it means acknowledging it, and acknowledging it means I can’t pretend this is simple anymore. “If I move on this without justification,” I say, “I draw attention from every direction that matters. My father will question it. The court will question it. Every house looking for a weakness will see one.”
“Then give them a reason not to,” she says.
“It doesn’t work like that.”
“Then make it.”
I almost laugh, but it dies before it reaches my throat. “You’re asking me to risk everything on something that doesn’t benefit us.”
“I’m asking you to stop pretending it doesn’t affect you,” she replies.
That lands harder than anything else she’s said, because there’s truth in it I haven’t decided what to do with yet. I look at her, at the steadiness in her posture and the way she refuses to back down even now, and I realize she isn’t going to let this go.
“You don’t understand the scale of what you’re asking,” I say.
“Then tell me,” she challenges.
I exhale slowly, glancing back toward the table where the report sits, the inked lines cutting across it in a pattern I can’t unsee now that I’ve recognized it. When I look back at her, the calculation has shifted, not resolved but no longer dismissed.
