“I listened.”
His gaze shifts to me. There it is again. That impossible stillness. As if he doesn’t know what to do with being obeyed when obedience isn’t submission. Good. Let him be uncomfortable too.
“The quiet place is east of the direct line,” I say. “We avoid it by cutting behind those ruin ribs.”
He follows my point.
The ruin ribs rise from the flats ahead, five black-red arcs half-buried in sand. Old City bones, maybe. Old ship fall debris, maybe. Tajss collects wreckage and makes everything look as if it grew teeth.
Kavor studies them for too long.
“What?” I ask.
“Too open between here and there.”
I look across the stretch. He’s right. Flat ground. Thin dust. No cover beyond a few low stones. Nothing but wind, sky, and the distant promise of shade.
“We cross fast.”
“No.”
I grit my teeth.
“This will be a long trip if every suggestion I make dies immediately,” I say.
“Not fast,” he says. “Soft.”
I hate that I understand the difference. Fast slaps the ground. Soft coaxes it. Fine. Infuriating, but fine.
“Soft,” I agree.
We leave the wall shadow. The open stretch feels longer than it had looked. Tajss has a way of making distance multiply under your feet.
I keep my pace steady. No drag. No hurry. Breath measured through my nose, out through my mouth. I make my body smallwithout letting it become weak. A narrow thing moving across a hot world before the heat fully wakes.
Beside me, Kavor changes again. Not visibly enough for anyone else, maybe, but I am built to notice what people try not to spend.
His silence gets harder. His wings stay tight. His gaze keeps sweeping the horizon, the sky, the exposed ground ahead, then drops as if he misses the floor speaking clearly beneath him.
I almost ask, then think better of it and don’t. Maybe he is allowed some secrets. No. That is too generous. He is allowed nothing that kills me. Everything else can wait.
We reach the first ruin rib, and its shadow falls across us like mercy. I step into it too quickly. The temperature barely drops. My body accepts it like a gift anyway.
Kavor moves in behind me, and for one brief breath the shadow is too narrow for both of us. His arm almost brushes mine. Not touching. Close enough that my skin decides to notice what my mind has not approved of.
He’s cool.
He doesn’t radiate heat like a human body. He is not warm in the way my traitorous imagination keeps expecting from someone that large and alive. The air near him is cooler, edged with stone and mineral and something darker, like deep places where water once thought about existing.
My pulse missteps. Stupid body. Stupid shadow.
Kavor goes still. Too still.
“Do not do that.”
His head turns slowly. “Do what?”
“Notice.”
