“Making it easier to eat.”
“That is not a thing.”
“It is.”
“You can’t improve that strip. Tajss already defeated it.”
He ignores me. Rude. And interesting.
He lays the pale strip on the stone shard, then sets the seed mash beside it. With one claw, he scrapes a pinch of dark mineral crust from a safe patch near the wall, smells it, rejects it, and wipes hisclaw clean on dust. Then he reaches into his pack again and pulls out something wrapped in cured hide.
Not a City ration. Something darker. A thin coil, dried almost black.
“What is that?” I ask, narrowing my eyes.
“Cavern food.”
“That did not answer the question.”
“Dried sismis fat and root paste.”
My stomach makes an opinion before I can murder it, and Kavor hears. His gaze flicks to me, then away, because he has apparently decided mercy is pretending not to hear my organs mutiny. I hate him for it, a little less than usual.
“We are not wasting your food,” I say.
“No.”
“Good.”
“We are using it,” he says.
“That is wasting it on purpose.”
“It is food.”
“It is yours,” I say.
“It is ours for the mission.”
“No.”
His eyes lift. There it is. The argument arrives with dusty boots and a knife out. I point at him.
“Don’t.”
“I have not spoken,” he says.
“You are gathering words.”
“Yes.”
“At least scatter them.”
“No.”
The blue glow flickers once behind the crack. Both of us go still. A faint pulse glows through the stone. Once. Pause. Again.
The little coil of cavern food sits between us. Ridiculous, really. That something as ordinary as food could feel more dangerous than the hidden glow. Kavor lowers his gaze first.
