She stares toward the route ahead, toward the third site near the quiet place, as if the map were still open in front of her and not tucked back into her pack. Her breathing has steadied. Her pulse has not. Too fast. Too thin.
I keep my hand at my side, though I want to hold her. Support her. I keep it at my side. The restraint feels like holding a zemlja beneath my own skin.
“We go,” she says.
No. Every instinct in me rejects the words. She should sit. Drink. Eat more. Wait until the white edge leaves her vision and her knees remember how to be strong. She should not move toward a place even her people named quiet with fear tucked beneath the word.
But the shade line has moved. Heat creeps beneath the leaning stone. The first sun has climbed high enough to turn the basin floor cruel. Staying will cook her slowly and give her more time to pretend she is fine. But moving may kill her faster.
Choices on Tajss are often insults wearing different clothes.
“We go,” I agree.
Her gaze flicks to mine. She expected an argument, but I give her none. I do not trust the condition of her body, but I trust her need to keep choosing. For now.
She steps out of the shade first, moving quickly.
I match her pace, staying at her side. Close enough to catch her if she wavers again, far enough that she can pretend I am not there for that reason. The lie helps her move, so I allow it.
The basin rim narrows beyond the ledge. Red stone shelves bend east, broken by old ruin ribs and dark cracks where heat collects in silence. The third site lies closer to the quiet place. Sera’s quiet place. The stretch where sound comes back wrong. Where a missing child followed a cooling draft and Penr lied badly after.
I do not like going there. I like returning with nothing even less. The ash-gray dust still clings beneath one claw. No scent. No life. No honest death. I curl that hand closed.
“What?” she asks, noticing my reaction.
“Nothing.”
“That answer has become insulting.”
“It was always insulting,” I say.
“At least you’re growing.”
Her voice is steady enough to cut, but her steps are less steady. It is slight. Most eyes would miss it. I do not. Her left foot lands more lightly than her right. She protects her body from itself, spending less through one leg, then the other, hiding weakness in alternating fractions.
Clever and dangerous. Sera reads the surface ahead. I read her. Both are difficult terrain.
“Dark shelf,” she says, pointing with two fingers. “Then angled rib. Don’t step where the dust looks smooth. It’s settled over a drainage split.”
“Old water channel?”
“Old something channel.”
She does not slow. The second sun has not risen above the ridge, but its light has begun to stain the horizon. Heat thickens in anticipation. Air trembles over the basin floor. The open sky presses down on me.
Too wide. Too bright. Nothing close enough to answer my breath.
The ruins ahead form a broken line of ribs, each one half-buried in sand and red mineral crust. Beyond them, a glassed rise catches the first sun and throws it back in hard flashes. Ancient heat made that place. Or ship fire. Or the Devastation. Tajss has many ways to turn stone into a warning.
Sera sees it and stops. This time the pause is tactical, not weakness, and I am too relieved by the difference.
“We need the shadow under that glassed shelf,” she says.
I look at the rise. A low overhang of fused stone and glass curves out from the basin rim. Beneath it, darkness. Narrow. Enclosed. The open side faces away from the first sun. A crack in the back wall might carry air.
Good shelter. Bad approach. Between us and it lies a slope of dark glass shards, red dust, and pale reflective stone.
“Danger?” I ask.
