“The one where you’re trying not to turn me into a crisis.”
His eyes cut to mine. “You are not a crisis.”
“Good.”
“The reaction is.”
I open my mouth. Close it. Unfair. Precise. Annoying.
We move again. The next pulse arrives stronger. Once. Pause. Again. Dust shifts in the grooves ahead. Kavor raises one hand and I freeze. This is not like the gray tendrils.
No thread rises. No jointed little horror pretending to be a root. Instead, the dust trembles along the channel and slides toward a crack in the left wall, grain by grain, as if something inside the stone has inhaled.
Kavor crouches. I should stay back, but I don’t. He looks at me. I look at him.
“Both are needed,” I whisper.
His nostrils flare. Then he shifts enough to give me room.
Good male.
Terrible thought.
I crouch beside him, careful of my arm. The channel runs into a seam between two cut stones. This isn’t a natural break, and it isn’t zemlja pressure. The seam is too clean beneath the dust, a narrow mouth fitted around something darker.
Kavor scrapes a claw lightly across the stone. A thin layer of mineral crust flakes away. Beneath it is not red stone or blackened epis. No gray dust. Metal. Dull, dark, blue-black metal with a faint green sheen where the crust breaks.
My stomach drops. Kavor goes still with recognition.
“What is that?” I ask.
His silence answers before he does.
“Not Tajss,” he says.
Two words. The passage seems to shrink around them. Not Tajss. I reach toward the seam, then stop before touching it. Kavor sees, but he doesn’t praise me. Smart.
“How not Tajss?” I ask.
“Off-world alloy.”
“You’re sure?”
His mouth hardens. “Yes.”
The word carries too much weight. Not guess. Not theory. Memory. Or teaching. Or scar.
The metal sits inside the old channel like a spike driven into a vein. It is narrow and ribbed, half-buried where the cut grooveenters the seam. Several hair-thin wires, or roots, or metal filaments disappear into the channel beneath crust and black residue.
Old Tajss stone around it. Off-world metal inside it. The old world taught stone to drink epis. Someone else taught the stone a new thirst.
“That’s what’s calling the zemlja?” I ask.
“One part.”
“One part is a bad phrase.”
“Yes.”
