The words cost her. I hear the shape of it. She wants to hold the light. Wants proof in her own hand. Wants it, and gives that want away because survival demands it. Not self-erasure this time. Choice. Different. Important.
I lift her pack. She reaches for it.
I hold it out, then pause. “It will pull on your arm.”
“I know.”
“I can carry it.” Her expression sharpens. Before she speaks, I add, “Not because you cannot. Because your arm is wounded and we need your balance more than your pride.”
“Insulting.”
“Yes.”
“Accurate.”
“Yes.”
She stares at the pack. At me. At the passage ahead.
Then she lets out a furious breath. “Fine.”
Victory should not feel like grief. I secure her pack against my own. She looks smaller without it. No. Not smaller. Less armored. I dislike that even more.
The wrong rhythm pulses once in the distance. Faint. Farther ahead now, not behind. Sera turns toward it.
“So the thing is moving.”
“Yes.”
“Toward what?”
I listen. The passage beneath us angles deeper, then bends west. The pulse travels through cut stone channels, not just tunnel stone. It is not random. It is not merely calling zemlja. It is going somewhere.
“Toward old structures,” I say.
“Under the City?”
“I do not know.”
Her face changes. Fear, this time, for something more than herself.
“Then we move,” she says.
I step beside her. She takes one careful breath, then starts forward. Not fast. Not steady enough. But moving.
The sample pulses against my chest, faint and blue. Her blood darkens the bandage. The gray thread rests wrapped in my pouch. And somewhere ahead, beneath old Tajss stone, the wrong rhythm waits.
Once. Pause. Again.
17
SERA
Kavor is quiet.
Not his usual stone-listening quiet or his danger-measuring quiet. Not the infuriating kind where he says one word and expects the rest of the world to do the work of understanding him. This quiet has teeth.
He walks beside me through the old passage, but everything about him has moved closer without touching. His wing angles slightly toward my injured side. His tail tracks behind my heels as if the tunnel itself might take offense and need correcting. His hand never reaches for me, but it never goes far either.
