My heartbeat stumbles. Stupid thing. Stupid body. Stupid, stupid words. I look at him then. I shouldn’t, but I do.
“You don’t know me well enough to sound that certain,” I say.
“I know hunger,” he says, his gaze holding mine.
The words are soft, but not gentle.
For a moment, the room thins around us. The leaders, the table, the tremor, the whole starving City pull back just far enough for me to see him. Really see him.
Dusky scaled. Still. Dangerous. And hungry, too, maybe. Not like me. Not for roots, or meat, or a portion rubbed off a slate. For something older. Deeper. Buried under stone and discipline.
Syin speaks, and the room crashes back around us.
“You are asking us to trust a cavern-born tracker and a starving human with the secret that destroyed our world.”
“No,” Rosalind says. Her voice is tired. Tired, and unyielding. “I am asking you to trust them with the chance to save what’s left of it.”
Another tremor shivers through the floor. This one is stronger. The ration tokens jump. Kavor’s head turns toward the east, and every Zmaj in the room follows.
For the first time, no one argues back. The City holds its breath with us. So do I.
Kavor’s claws touch the stone, and recognition cuts across his face.
“It’s not moving past the sinkline,” he says.
Every Zmaj in the room goes still. My fingers tighten around the ration token.
“It’s turning back.”
6
KAVOR
The City gives us a room. Less than a room. A hollow.
The old stone pinches inward at the ceiling, curving too low for my wings to settle comfortably and too close for air to move. Shelves have been cut directly into the walls. Bundles of reed-wrapped maps, bone tokens, route ledgers, and old patrol slates fill the space in tight rows, each marked by a hand too careful to belong to someone who thought records were only records.
Humans write things down because memory dies. Zmaj carve memory into the body and call the scars wisdom. I stand near the entrance and listen to the stone. The tremor has faded. That does not mean I trust the quiet. Quiet can lie.
The eastern movement remains, distant and deep, not in the sound but beneath it. A slow pressure. A pulse that does not belong to wind, heat, or the ordinary migration of a zemlja. Something is wrong. It is not only dangerous, but wrong. The difference matters.
Danger follows laws. Hunger. Territory. Heat. Pressure. Prey. Wrongness has intention before it has shape.
I flex my claws against the floor, then still them. The stone answers with nothing useful. Too many bodies have passed through this level since the tremor. Too much fear. Too many restless steps. Human panic leaves a rhythm behind like scent.
Sera’s rhythm is not panic. That is why I noticed her. Not because she is soft. She is not. Not because she is weak. She is not that either, no matter how little her body has been allowed.
She moves like a creature trained by scarcity. Every step chosen. Every pause accounted for. Breath measured. Weight shifted toward cooler stone. Pain folded away before it can become visible enough to cost anyone else concern.
It is the folding away I dislike. The City sees discipline. I see damage that has learned to stand upright.
A sound scrapes from the passage. A basket, then footsteps. Hers. I know it before she reaches the arch. That should concern me. It does, but not enough.
Sera steps into the archive hollow with a stack of slates against her chest and a reed map tube tucked under one arm. Her face is pale beneath the dust, mouth pressed flat, eyes too sharp for a body running on too little food. She has braided her hair tighter since the council chamber. Efficient. Defensive. A small human weapon made of hunger and refusal. She stops when she sees me.
“I was told the archive was being opened,” she says.
“For you.”
