“I’m telling you the mining broke something, and now the reaching is killing you. You could have lived unbonded. The biology was manageable. The damage made it lethal.”
The silence lasts. The fire crackles behind me, and water drips down the back wall.
“Say that again,” he says.
“Which part?”
“The part where I could have lived.”
I hold his gaze. “You could have lived. Unbonded. Fine. But now the bonding chemistry has nowhere to go, and the backed-up compound is destroying you from the inside. That’s mechanics, not fate.”
His gaze fixes on a point past my shoulder. The tremor in his hands worsens, then stops, then starts again, and the scales at his throat flush with color that arrives and leaves.
He stands, the motion fast and fluid, and walks past me without looking at me, through the main chamber, past the workbench, out into the cold.
I let him go.
I walk back to the workbench and sit down. My right hand shakes, the one that never shakes, and I press it flat against the stone until the tremor passes. Then I stand up and walk to the cave mouth.
The mountain is dark, cold air coming off the snow, and somewhere below, in the black, his heat signature is moving through the switchbacks. I can’t see him. The venom in my blood tells me which direction.
I don’t follow. I don’t call out. I stand in the cold with my right hand shaking and the notebook open behind me on a shelf he carved, and I wait for him to come back.
He comes back sometime after midnight. I hear the scrape of claws on granite.
I’m still at the cave mouth, sitting now, my back against the rock, the cold long past uncomfortable and into the place where it’s just information. He passes me without speaking and settles against the far wall.
His heartbeat is fast. Ragged.
I go to my bedroll. I don’t cross the cave. I don’t fill the silence.
My right hand doesn’t stop shaking for a long time.
SIRATH
Her heartbeat matches mine.
I’ve been lying in the dark for an hour, listening to her heart run on my rhythm, beat for beat, the bonding chemistry doing what bonding chemistry does.
The anger is still there from yesterday. Not at her, but at a cave I worked in two years ago, at the dust I breathed and didn’t think twice about, at the fact that I spent thirty years refusing to bond and the refusal was survivable until it wasn’t, and the thing that broke it was a job.
I don’t sleep.
Before dawn, I go down to the tree line, scrub and snow, the air so cold it burns my throat scales. I find a hare in the brush, kill it fast, and clean it on a flat rock. Good gutting work; I learned it from watching humans at the lowland markets years ago, their knives small and precise, and the technique translates.
On the way back I stop at the hot spring vent near the second switchback, steam rising from a crack in the granite, the mineral deposits crusted white and yellow along the edges. I chip a handful of sulfur crystals from the vent lip and carry them in my palm.
The hare because she called my food spite jerky and the words have been in me for days. The crystals because I’ve watched her work, and in her constant murmuring, she had mentioned wishing for sulfur. I can’t give her much. I can give her this.
I set both on the workbench shelf next to her notebook and don’t say anything.
She finds them when she wakes. The hare she picks up and turns over. “This is recent.”
“This morning.”
She sets the hare down and picks up the sulfur crystals, holding one to the light from the glow-stone, and her face does the thing it does when the science opens up in front of her. “Where did you find this?”
“Hot spring vent. Second switchback.”
