The storage spacesmells like salt and damp wood.
My thermal scanning’s been flickering since the Scylla shield. So, when I try to read the room’s heat signatures, the image stutters and fades, like a signal cutting in and out.
I’ve never been this depleted. It’s like going blind. My thermal scanning is how I process the world—heart rates, core temperatures, and heat fingerprints that tell me who’s nearby and what they’re feeling before they open their mouths.
Without it, I’m just guessing, like everyone else.
I hate guessing.
“Three water barrels.” I crouch beside the nearest one, running my fingers along the wood. “This one’s maybe fifteen percent full. The other two seem better.”
“Seem?” Kieran says from behind me, and even half-blind, even with my scanning flickering like a dying signal, his is the signature my magic holds onto the longest.
He’s the furnace that never banks. It’s almost superhuman in its intensity, which makes sense, since you don’t kill seventy-three vampires and rogues with steel alone if you don’t burnhotter than the rest of us. He feels like war given a pulse, and I’ve stopped trying to classify him into any system I know.
But I need to focus on what’s important right now, which is counting our rations—not cataloging Kieran Cross’s thermal output like it’s a research project I’m trying to ace.
“I need to open them to be certain,” I tell him. “The formula for cylindrical volume is relatively straightforward, but without knowing the exact?—”
“Evie.”
“Yes?”
“Approximately is fine.”
Right. Of course it is.
Stop being weird.
That’s easier said than done, especially when I move to the dried goods and my shoulder brushes his chest. The contact lasts maybe half a second, but the heat that bleeds through my shirt stays long after I’ve pulled away, searing itself there like a handprint.
I step back, my cheeks burning, nearly knocking over a crate in the process.
“Twelve ration packs. Five people. Three meals a day. That’s...” The math blurs. Numbers I could calculate in my sleep are swimming, and I have to start over. “Less than a day. Maybe thirty-six hours if we skip dinner and reduce portion sizes by half.”
“We’re not going to starve,” he says, sounding surprisingly patient.
“The human body can function on reduced caloric intake for extended periods of time, but cognitive function begins to decline after seventy-two hours of severe restriction. And given that we need to navigate monster-infested waters while potentially engaging in combat, impaired cognitive function could prove?—”
“Evie.”
I stop talking, my jaw clicking shut so hard my teeth hurt.
Kieran crouches beside me, his knee pressing against my thigh, heat bleeding through my clothes where we’re touching.
“We’ll find land,” he assures me. “When we do, we’ll restock supplies and kill whatever tries to stop us.”
“And if the land has monsters?” I ask, sinceeveryland here likely has monsters.
“Then we eat the monsters.”
A laugh tears out of me, and once it starts, I can’t make it stop.
“Monster meat,” I manage to say. “You want to eat Scylla.”
“You were already cooking her with your shield,” he says, quieter now, almost gentle. “And that laugh...”
I sniff and wipe my eyes. “What about it?”
