If. One small mercy. A fragile word, thin enough to see the knife behind it. I straighten. The silver at the edge of my vision pulses, then clears.
“If,” I say, “then I want the eastern maps, the last three route ledgers, the sinkline reports, and the names of every person who died within sight of that trail.”
Ila’s brows rise. Dannel looks surprised. Good. Let them remember I’m not only a body to send into the sand. I’m the person who reads what the dead were trying to tell us.
Kavor’s gaze changes, barely, but enough for me to feel it. Respect. Or warning. With him, they might be the same thing.
“Done,” Adran says.
Of course he agrees quickly. Leaders love competence most when it walks willingly into danger. I look at Kavor again. This time, I don’t let myself look away.
“And if I go,” I say, “you do not command me like I am some warrior.”
A faint shift moves through the room. Kavor’s claws scrape against the stone.
“No,” he says. I wait. He understands the waiting. I see the moment he does. “No. I listen.”
I don’t know what to do with that. It isn’t comfort. It isn’t safety. It’s worse. A promise shaped like risk.
Somewhere deep in the City stone outside the chamber, a tremor whispers through the floor. Not loud. Not violent. Only enough to make the table shiver beneath my fingers.
Every Zmaj in the room goes still. Kavor lowers his gaze to the stone. His breath leaves him slowly. Too slowly.
“What?” I ask before I can stop myself.
His eyes lift to mine.
“Tajss is answering,” Kavor says.
5
SERA
The words settle into the chamber, quiet and terrible, and every old rule I’ve ever learned rises up inside me at once.
Don’t cross new-sunk sand.
Don’t sleep over hollow ground.
Don’t trust a ridge that wasn’t there yesterday.
Don’t ask Tajss why it opens its mouth.
Another tremor shivers through the stone. Small, but enough to loosen dust from one of the old grooves in the wall and send it drifting down in a thin red veil.
The Zmaj feel it differently. Their bodies react before the tremor reaches my feet. Wings tighten. Claws flex. Tails shift. Heads angle, not toward the sound, but toward something beneath it.
Listening. All of them listening.
Kavor lowers one hand toward the floor without touching it. His claws hover above the stone, black and curved and too still.
“What does that mean?” I ask, my mouth dry and voice thin.
Kavor doesn’t answer immediately. His attention is somewhere below us, following a thing none of us can see.
“Kavor,” Rosalind says.
His gaze snaps to her. No, not snaps. That would be too human. It returns to her.
