“What?” I ask.
“You’re sitting after this.”
“I’m standing,” I say.
“Temporarily,” she says.
I open my mouth.
Kavor says, “Yes.”
I glare at Kavor. He doesn’t look sorry, and the room sees. I should mind. I don’t. That might be the strangest miracle of the day.
Adran sees too. His expression gives nothing away, but I know he’s recalculating. Not Sera alone. Not Kavor alone. Not the bond as weakness. Not the bond as tool. Something else.
A political fact with teeth. Let him recalculate.
Below us, the floor gives a soft pulse.
Once. A pause. Again.
Everyone freezes. Not the violent wrong rhythm from before. Fainter. Deeper. Farther away.
Kavor’s hand closes around mine.
Not to restrain me. To listen together.
The bond warms, carrying the tremor through him, through me, through the stone under our feet. I feel the source below, not clearly, not safely, but enough to know it’s still there. Breathing blue in the dark. Wounded. Waiting.
And beyond it, so faint I almost convince myself I imagined it, an answering thread pulls upward. Not from the ground. From somewhere cold and star-bright.
My arm pulses once beneath the bandage. Kavor feels it. Rosalind sees both of us react.
“What?” she asks.
The room has gone very quiet. I look at Kavor, and he nods once. He felt it too.
“The signal beyond Tajss,” I say. “It is still there.”
Adran’s face sharpens. Not greed this time. Fear. Real fear.
He should be afraid. We all should. Rosalind rests one hand on the map.
“Can it reach the City?” she asks.
“Not yet,” Kavor says.
Yet. The word hangs over the table like a suspended blade. Syin mutters in Zmaj. Virn answers, lower.
“Lovely. Ground wants us. Sky wants us. We’re very popular,” Ila says after a heavy exhale.
No one laughs. Then Penr does laugh. A tiny, terrified sound. It breaks something loose in the room. Not hope. Not yet. But air.
I look at the map. At the blank spaces beneath us. At the marked routes, the fragile circles, and the places we think are solid because no one has fallen through them yet.
Kavor’s hand rests beside mine. Not covering. Beside.
The way we started surviving. The way we will keep going. I take another drink of broth. Then water. Because I can. Because I should. Because survival is not enough, but it’s still where living starts.
