“I will not wedge.”
“You scraped one wing in a polite crack five breaths ago.”
“Stone was jealous.”
“Stone was winning.”
The wrong rhythm rolls through the stone. Once. Pause. Again. This time the sample flashes against his chest, blue-white through the pouch.
Kavor’s face hardens. Not fear. Or not only fear. Anger. I know the difference because I’ve been studying his expressions against my will.
“Move,” he says.
Low. I should snap at him, but I resist. There is no room left in this chamber for pride and survival both, and I am tired of asking my body to carry unnecessary weight.
“Committed-fast,” I say.
He pauses, just for half a breath. Then he turns into the rear passage.
No argument. No protector wall. No “stay behind me” growl. He goes because I am right, and he trusts me enough to let the answer be mine. That should not feel like warmth. Except everything about him does now.
The passage behind the dead growth slopes sharply downward. Kavor has to fold his wings so tight the joints press against the wall. His tail drags low, sweeping dust into little crescents. I follow close, one hand on the stone, one on my pack strap, reading what little my human senses can steal.
The air is cooler. Not safe-cool. Buried-cool. The kind that lives where sunlight has never spent itself out.
Old zemlja leavings darken the lower walls, but the streaks break apart here. Broken. Smudged thin. Thin ash-gray threads wind through the mineral bands, like veins in a dying hand. I don’t like that. I like it even less when Kavor keeps touching the wall and then rubbing his claws together as if something should be there and is not.
“No scent?” I ask.
“No.”
“Same as before?”
“Worse.”
Wonderful. Then the passage bends left. Sound bends wrong with it. My boot scuffs once, barely, and the noise goes ahead of us, comes back from below, and then returns behind my ear.
I stop. Kavor stops, too. Before I speak. Before I touch him. Before I even decide to stop. Our rhythms have learned each other. That is inconvenient. And useful. Mostly inconvenient.
“Quiet place,” I whisper.
His eyes shift toward the darkness ahead. “Yes.”
The third site. The one near the quiet place. We didn’t approach from outside because the heat pinned us under glass and the crack opened like an omen with poor manners. But this passage is carrying us there from beneath.
Maps reflect where the ground betrayed us before. This ground is creative. I hate it.
“We should be above the third mark,” I whisper.
“Below.”
“Near enough to be rude.”
“Yes.”
The sample pouch pulses once against his chest. Soft. A blue heartbeat under his hand. My gaze sticks to it. Kavor sees.
“You would rather carry it,” he says.
