His jaw tightens. He wants to argue. He doesn’t. Good. I couldn’t survive kindness right now, not if it came with teeth.
“And I’m scared,” I continue, because apparently falling through a floor broke the hinge on my mouth, “that if I go back into that room and let them turn me into a map, a blood sample, a route-runner, a person who can stand between starving mouths and hope, I will let them. Because I know how to be useful. I don’t know how to belong to you.”
Kavor inhales, slow, controlled, devastated.
“Mine is not a task,” he says.
My eyes burn.
“I know.”
“No,” he says softly. “Not yet.”
That cuts deep because it’s true. I wipe my face with the back of my good hand before the tears can form properly.
“Don’t be good right now.”
“I do not know how to be anything else for you,” he says.
“Liar.”
His mouth almost moves. Almost.
“You’re very bad at lying,” I say.
“Yes.”
The hallway trembles under our feet. Not hard. Just a reminder that the City is impatient with heartbreak. Of course it is. I straighten. Badly.
Kavor watches. He doesn’t help, because I haven’t asked. Because he has learned the shape of my pride, and now it has to live with the consequences.
“Whatever happened below has to wait,” I say.
His eyes close once. When they open, he has already put armor over whatever I have just cut. I hate that I can see the seam.
“Yes,” he says.
That single word hurts more than an argument would have. I nod. Duty slides back over me, familiar, heavy, and cold.
“I need Ila.”
“Yes.”
“I need Rosalind to lock the samples.”
“Yes.”
“I need you to tell Virn and Syin exactly what you felt from the zemlja, not what they want to hear.”
“Yes.”
“And Kavor…”
He waits. I should say thank you. I should say I’m sorry. I should say that the cavern was real. I should say I want you so badly that I’m afraid it will make me less myself, even though some secret part of me thinks maybe it would make me more.
Instead I say, “Keep Adran away from the proof.”
His face goes still. There it is. The break. Small. Clean. Self-inflicted.
