“Better,” she says.
It is not forgiveness. I do not deserve that yet. I nod once. She reaches for the gear bundle and begins sorting items into two piles. Her hands are practical. Angry. Alive.
“Three skins,” she mutters. “Of all the things I had to agree with you on.”
“You agreed because I was right.”
“I agreed because dying stupid offends me.”
“Yes,” I say. “That too.”
Her mouth twitches again. This time she hides it faster. The ground hums beneath us. Not a tremor. A pattern. Three faint pulses. Then silence.
My body goes cold. Sera sees my face.
“What?” she asks.
I press my claws to the stone. Nothing. The silence after the pulses is too clean. Too deliberate. I have heard zemlja answer hunger. I have heard they follow collapse, heat, blood, pressure. I have never heard one move like that.
“What?” she asks again, quieter now.
I lift my claws from the floor. Dust clings beneath one black tip, vibrating in a pattern too fine for human eyes. I rub it away before she can see enough to ask the right question.
“Nothing useful yet,” I say.
Her gaze sharpens. She knows I am holding back. Good. She should.
“Then stop listening to the floor and help me decide which of these knives is least likely to get me killed.”
I look at the blades. Then at her.
“This one,” I say, choosing the smaller, curved knife.
She takes it, tests the weight, and frowns. “This is the smallest.”
“It is the quietest.”
“I hate that that makes sense.”
“You will hate many true things before the first heat.”
“Comforting.”
“It was not meant to be.”
“I noticed,” she says, snorting.
The rhythm does not return. That is worse. The room feels suddenly smaller, the stone less like shelter and more like a mouth holding its breath.
Sera bends over the gear, unaware of how close the wrongness came to revealing itself beneath our feet. Not a zemlja. Not only zemlja. I look toward the east, toward the buried trail, toward the pressure turning back under Tajss.
Someone or something is teaching the ground a new rhythm. And before the first heat, I will have to lead her into it.
7
SERA
The City opens before the first heat. Not all of it. Only the narrow eastern passage no one uses unless something has gone wrong enough that the main gates are worse.
