“Yes.”
“There it is.”
“You can need food and not feel hunger.”
Her expression shifts because the words land somewhere unexpected. Whether good or bad, I do not know.
“Bodies learn lies too,” I say.
The shelter is quiet. Her throat moves. Outside, heat washes over the glassed stone in shimmering waves. Inside, the narrow space holds us too close and not close enough.
Sera looks down at her hands and, for once, she says nothing. Then the ground beneath the shelter pulses. Once. A pause. Again.
The water skin rolls between us. Not toward the slope. Not with wind, but sideways. Toward the rear crack. Sera’s head lifts. So does mine.
Deep inside the stone, beyond the narrow black seam at the back of the shelter, something answers the rhythm.
And this time, it glows blue.
13
SERA
Blue light glows from inside the stone. It’s not much. Probably not enough to save anyone or even to prove anything, if a person is determined to be cruel about hope. But it is there.
A thin pulse glows beyond the rear crack, soft and impossible, blue-purple light breathing somewhere deep inside the fused stone. It answers the rhythm once, then dims until I think I imagined it.
But I didn’t. Kavor sees it too. I’m sure of that because his whole body changes.
He doesn’t lunge forward or make some dramatic warrior noise. He goes still in that deep, terrible way of his, as if every scale, claw, breath, and thought has turned toward the seam.
I forget to breathe. Then the light comes again. Faint. Blue. Real. My hand tightens around the water skin.
“No,” I whisper.
Kavor’s gaze cuts to me. I don’t know what I mean by it. No, because I can’t bear to want this. No, because it is too little. No, because it is in a place we cannot reach. No, because if hope has teeth too, I am tired of feeding myself to it.
The glow fades.
The shelter turns red-dark again, lit by the heat glare outside and the thin spill of second-sun fire crawling along the threshold. The air tastes of hot glass, dust, old mineral, and something sharper now, something almost alive beneath the bitter leavings.
Kavor turns toward the crack. I catch his wrist before I can think. His scales are cool under my fingers. Hard and alive.
We both look at my hand, and I let go first. Obviously.
“Don’t,” I say.
“I had not moved,” he says, his eyes meeting mine.
“You thought loudly.”
The corner of his mouth twists, only a little. Ridiculous, that I see it at all.
“The crack is too narrow,” I say, because I need practical words before the silence starts gnawing on things I don’t want exposed. “Too unstable. It might widen farther in, but not from this side. Not without tools.”
“We need to know what answered.”
“We do not need to wedge ourselves into a hot glass coffin because something glowed once.”
