She turns from the workbench, and her face changes, the warmth from the morning closing and something sharper moving in. Her eyes go to my hands first, the way they go to anything she means to read. She knows the sickness tremor; this is not the sickness, and she sees that it is not. “How long?”
“Soon. They’ve stopped being cautious.” I sit by the fire. “There are three approaches. The eastern path is the widest, but it passes under an ice shelf I can bring down. The western path crosses a scree field that sounds like breaking glass. The direct route up the switchbacks narrows at two points.”
She listens without interrupting and doesn’t reach for the notebook.
“I can hold the narrow points alone,” I say. “The question is whether they try one path or split.”
“How many?”
“Six, maybe more. The tracks overlap.”
She’s quiet for a moment. Then: “I have compounds that could help. Contact irritants from the frostbark scrub near the tree line. Diluted venom extracts that would incapacitate without killing. I can mix a few things and place them along the approaches.”
“Traps.”
“Deterrents. There’s a difference.” She tilts her chin. “I’m a poisoner. Let me poison things. You handle the part where you’re enormous and terrifying.”
“Division of labor.”
“See? You’re getting it.”
I look at her across the cave, glow-stone light on her face, the workbench covered in her vials and her stone and her notebook and the salve jar, her hair still messy from sleep, the bite marks on her neck fading.
“I’ll need to see the approaches today,” she says. “You show me where to place the deterrents. I’ll mix them tonight.”
“After the morning bite.”
“After the morning bite.”
She tilts her head and bares the left side of her neck. The gesture has become routine. The hunger under it has not. I cross the cave and put my hand on the side of her face, and she leansinto it, and I bite, and the venom rises wanting all of her at once. I give her the measured dose and nothing past it. She breathes heavily, licks her lips. Her eyes are warm when they open.
“We should go,” she says. “Before the sun melts the prints.”
We go. She packs three empty vials, the pipette, and a handful of frostbark she collected near the tree line last week, and I lead her down the switchbacks, showing her the three approaches, the choke points, the scree field.
She walks the paths the way she walks everything, alert and observant, asking questions I don’t expect, not about defense but about the rocks, whether the frostbark grows faster in shade or sun, which approach holds snow longest. She’s thinking about chemistry, not strategy: where to place compounds that react to body heat, which surfaces hold a contact irritant longest, how wind carries a scent.
I’m thinking about lines of sight and where to put my body between the threat and the cave.
Between the threat and her.
On the walk back up, she takes my hand, her fingers lacing through mine, small and warm between the scales. She doesn’t say anything about it. Neither do I.
We walk the rest of the way like that.
RUELLE
There's a question I've been not-asking for three days. I test two samples before dawn. Just two.
The blackfin scorpion first, my oldest tolerance, blood on stone, retained sample pressed to the edge. Clean null reaction. Tolerant. Holding.
Then the blue-ringed compounds, the closest structural match to his bonding chemistry, the tolerance that cost me three months and a tremor in my left hand. The stone shows a faint color shift, not null, not failed, but not the clean reaction it should be.
I stare at it. The shift is small. It could be noise, fatigue, dehydration, a dozen variables I haven’t controlled for.
Or it could be his venom signature showing up in my blood in a way it wasn’t before.
I wrap the stone in its cloth and put the vials away. I’ll test the other seventeen retained samples when the light is better. Each one holds a venom I built a tolerance to over the years, and if the blue-ringed is shifting, the others might be too. I need the pattern before I can understand what’s causing it.
