“Like what?”
“Like someone dried it out of spite.”
“It’s preserved mountain goat.”
“It’s preserved something. I’m not convinced it’s goat. I’ve had goat. Goat has a flavor. That has an absence of flavor so aggressive it circles back around to being a statement.”
I stare at her. She’s looking at the vial, not at me, and the corner of her mouth is doing something I haven’t seen before, not quite a smile and not quite not a smile.
She’s making a joke. About my food. While holding a sample of my venom up to the light.
“I’ll find something else,” I say.
“Don’t trouble yourself. I’ve been eating worse. At least your spite jerky is consistent.”
I make a noise, the shape of a laugh without the practice, something that gets halfway there and stops because the muscles don’t remember the rest.
She glances at me, and the expression stays a second longer, the unguarded thing her face does when she forgets to hold it still. I want to see it again. Then she turns back to the vial and her voice sharpens.
The afternoon routine: she runs tests, and I sit across the cave and watch her work. Her voice carries when she talks to herself, low fragments of analysis she’s not directing at me but that I hear anyway.Flush response sluggish in the deteriorated zones.
The same inflection she used this morning to tell me she’s attracted to me.
Later, I walk to the cave mouth. The air is cold and clean, and below, on the approach road, something moves.
I go still. The heat pits along my jaw register a warm body against the cold mountain, moving fast. A runner, one person, along the lower switchback. The gait is human, even pace, uniform stride, the disciplined movement of someone trained to cover ground. Lean, smaller than the stride made them sound. Something hangs on a cord at their throat and catches the light when they turn their head.
Not a traveler. Nobody uses this road, because nobody comes here.
The runner reaches the second switchback and pauses, looking up toward the cave entrance, and glass in their hand catches the light. A distance lens. They’re scanning the upper mountain.
Thirty seconds. Then they stow the lens, turn, and head back down, southwest toward the lowland road, toward the nearest walled city. I memorize the gait, the stride length, the direction.
Behind me, Ruelle says, “The fourth sample is ready. I need a resting concentration draw before you eat.”
I turn from the cave mouth. She’s holding a vial, her dark eyes focused on the work. “Runner on the lower switchback,” I say. “Distance lens. Uniform stride. Headed back toward the lowland road.”
She looks up. Her expression doesn’t change, but something behind her eyes sharpens. “How long were they looking?”
“Thirty seconds. Then back down.”
“One person?”
“One person.”
She nods, goes back to the vial, files it.
I walk toward her. I don’t tell her about Thassren, and I don’t tell her that every chemical signal she’s producing arrives through my heat pits like a declaration.
The number of things I’m not telling her is smaller than it would have been if I’d held the runner back. But it’s still growing, and every one of them matters.
“Coming,” I say.
I sit down, and she hands me the vial. Our fingers touch, and her temperature spikes by half a degree. I know it before she does.
She told me she’s attracted to me, and I’m sitting here with a dead male’s voice in my head, and the words are wrong.
He didn’t sayrewriting. I changed the word. I’ve been changing it for thirty years.
