“How close?” Adran asks, his face turning grim.
The Cavern Zmaj answers without looking away from the table.
“There are zemlja signs beyond the eastern sinkline.”
My blood goes cold. Zemlja. That word, I know. Everyone in the City knows zemlja. Not by sight, if they’re lucky. By the rules.
Don’t cross new-sunk sand. Don’t sleep over hollow ground. Don’t follow a fresh ridge, unless you want to become part of what made it.
The massive worms move beneath Tajss like hunger given bodies. They tunnel through stone, sand, ruin, bone. They make the planet change its mind about where ground belongs. And this miracle plant grows near them? Of course it does. Tajss never gives without setting teeth around the gift.
“No,” Syin says, his voice dropping low.
The Cavern Zmaj doesn’t look at him.
“The trail is old enough that growth may follow,” he says, speaking more to Rosalind than the others.
“That doesn’t mean that the zemlja isn’t still near,” Virn says.
“Yes.”
One word. Flat. Terrible.
The chamber suddenly feels too full of bodies. Too much breath. Too much fear pretending to be strategy.
“If there’s a source close enough to reach...” Rosalind says, her fingers drumming faster on the table.
“There’s no reaching it with a team,” the Cavern Zmaj says. Every gaze moves to him, but he doesn’t seem to care. “A group creates vibration. Noise. Heat. Panic. The zemlja hears all of it.”
“Then no one goes,” Marut scoffs.
The Cavern Zmaj looks directly at him.
“No,” he says. “Then almost no one goes.”
The words sink into me before I understand why. Almost no one. A horrible little space opens beneath my ribs as his gaze shifts. To me.
For one impossible second, all I hear is the slow scrape of my breath.
No. Absolutely not.
I’m a route-runner. A ration pathfinder. A woman who knows which corridors hold night-cool air and which ruins lie about shade. I’m not someone who follows worms. But the look in his eyes says he has already measured something in me the way I measure portions.
Something useful. Something dangerous. Something I may not be allowed to refuse.
4
SERA
“No,” I say, too fast and too loud.
The Cavern Zmaj’s gaze stays on me, and somehow that makes it worse. It’s not that his look is cruel. Cruel, I understand. Cruel has shape. Cruel takes what it wants and leaves bruises behind. This is different.
He looks at me like I’m a route marked on a slate. A narrow path through heat and stone and hunger. Something already half-decided by the shape of the problem. My hands curl against the edge of the table.
“No,” I say again, quieter this time, because if the room is going to stare, at least I can give it less to feed on. “Absolutely not.”
“No one has asked you anything,” Marut says, exhaling sharply through his nose.
