His gaze brushes me. I feel it without looking.
“That is an unfamiliar rule,” he says.
“It applies to both of us. I hate it.”
His silence changes.
Then, “Open places are difficult.”
I keep walking.
“Even underground?”
“Yes.”
“Because there are too many directions?”
“Because there is not enough answer.”
I glance at him then. His face is turned toward the cavern wall, but his eyes aren’t on the glow. They are on the distance between pillars. The ceiling’s height. The black places beyond the blue.
“In narrow stone, sound returns,” he says. “Pressure speaks. Walls hold shape. A body knows where danger can fit. In open places, the world stops answering in time.”
I don’t expect to, but I understand it. The need for the world to answer before it can kill you.
“In the City,” I say slowly, “wide plazas are death in second heat. People think open space means freedom only if they’ve never watched someone faint halfway across it.”
His gaze shifts to me. I shrug with one shoulder. The uninjured one. I’m learning.
“I don’t like open either,” I say.
His eyes sharpen with recognition. There. Another thread between us, thin, glowing, and completely inconvenient.
We walk in silence for several breaths. Not an empty silence. The kind that has been given something to carry.
The ridge curves around a pool. The water is shallow, if it’s water. Blue light floats beneath the surface in thin strands like roots seeking darkness. Epis grows along the edges, heavy andbright. The reflection makes the whole cavern seem deeper than it is, an upside-down world under our feet.
I stop before I mean to, and Kavor stops with me.
“What?” he asks.
I shake my head. The answer is too large. I look at the pool, the hanging glow, and the old structures, and I feel something worse than hunger. Want. Not for food. Not only. For time.
For one hour where the City is not above me. Where no one is waiting for my hands to carry bad news, smaller portions, route warnings, death lists. Where the world doesn’t demand that I turn every breath into usefulness.
For one hour with Kavor beside me, not because we are forced together, but because neither of us has moved away. The wanting terrifies me so much that I almost step back.
Kavor’s voice is quiet. “Sera.”
“No.”
I don’t know what I’m refusing. Him. Myself. The cavern. All of it.
He says nothing. That’s the problem. He knows when silence is an open hand. I look into the pool until the blue reflection blurs.
“I don’t want this to end,” I say.
The words leave me before I can count them. Before I can decide whether they cost too much. The cavern hears. Kavor hears. I hear.
