She wakes up the way she does everything, fast and aware, no transition between sleep and not-sleep. Her eyes open, and she looks at me, then at her hand on my arm, then at the position of our bodies, tangled together on furs that smell like both of us.
“Morning,” she says.
“Morning.”
“Your scales are bright.”
“Your hair is in my mouth.”
She snorts, an actual snort, ungraceful, and her face does the thing I’ve been collecting. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be. Tastes better than the spite jerky.”
She stares at me, her mouth opening. “Did you just make a joke?”
“No.”
“You made a joke. At dawn. Before food. Before the sun is up. Before I’ve had water.” She sits up, her hair everywhere, and points at me. “I’m counting that. Eight.”
“Eight what?”
“Almost-laughs. I’ve been keeping count. That was the first actual joke, though. New category.” She runs her fingers through her hair, working out the tangles. “I’m putting it in the notebook.”
“You are not.”
“Underbehavioral observations, subcategory: evidence of personality.”
I watch her stand and stretch and walk to the water source and splash her face and dress, and the ordinariness of it lodges somewhere behind my sternum. I don’t try to name it.
She comes back, sits on the stone seat at the workbench, reaches for the salve jar. “Turn around. Morning application.”
I turn, and her hands are on my back, the salve cool at first, then warm as it works into the scale tissue, her thumbs along the gland line, the new growth coming in bright where the dead patches used to be.
We’ve done this every evening for days, but this morning her hands move differently. She lingers on the healthy scales, traces the ridge of my spine with her fingertips, the touch light and deliberate, and I close my eyes and let her.
“The regrowth is accelerating,” she says. “You’re responding faster than I projected.”
“Is that good?”
“That’s very good. It means the treatment is working, which means I’m good at my job, which I already knew, but confirmation is nice.”
“Humble.”
“Accurate. There’s a difference.”
A low rumble in my chest.
After the salve, I go to the cave mouth. The air is cold, the sky clear, the sun not yet over the ridge, and down the slope the snow tells the story.
Fresh tracks, more this time, same path as before, advanced past the second switchback.
The tracks millaround the wide section. They spent time there. Looking at the upper approaches. Discussing.
Learning the way to a cave with her inside it. The venom comes up fast, not the slow bonding surge I have learned to carry but something with teeth, flooding to the front of my jaw with no dose to measure and nothing holding it back.
For a breath I am not careful. For a breath I want to go down to the switchback and meet them and show them what lives at the top of this mountain. Then I take it back, harder than I have ever had to take anything back. My hands are shaking, and it is not the sickness.
I go back inside. “They’ve been past the second switchback,” I say. “Three sets. They stopped at the wide section and spent time there. Looking up.”
