SIRATH
She keeps up.
That’s the first thing.
The road out of the settlement climbs steeply within the first mile, switchbacks cut into loose shale, and she keeps up. She doesn’t ask me to slow down and she doesn’t complain.
Her breathing is audible on the steeper pitches but steady, the breathing of a body that has learned where to spend effort and where to save it.
Her boots hit the rock in an even rhythm, and the pack on her back is light enough that she carries it without adjusting the straps.
She’s asking questions before we clear the settlement gates. “How long since the onset? The scale deterioration. When did you first notice it?”
I don’t answer. How can I talk so easily about what is killing me? When did I notice? It was just suddenly there…
“Fine,” she presses on. “Concentration. Do you know your own baseline? Has anyone ever drawn a sample and tested it?”
“No.”
“What about production rate? Does it feel constant, or does it cycle? Morning versus night, rest versus activity?”
“I don’t generally discuss my biology with strangers.”
“I’m not a stranger. You just bought me.” She says it clean, not wounded, not angry, a fact. “And you know you need something, or you wouldn’t have spent two thousand gold on the last lot of the night.”
I walk faster. She matches the pace without comment.
The road narrows after the second mile as the rock walls close in, and the air gets colder as we climb, the wind stripping heat from exposed skin in minutes. The moon is up, nearly full, bright enough at this altitude to turn the switchbacks silver, and she navigates by it without trouble.
I’ve been aware of her behind me for two miles. The heat pits along my jaw register her body temperature, her stride, the even work rate of someone who has been walking for months.
Under the heat and the stride, something else. Her pulse, quick at the throat. The salt of her skin on the cold air. My glands answer before I decide to let them, the venom rising behind my jaw toward a body it has already chosen. I pull it back.
She hasn’t slowed once.
“The tremor,” she says. “How long in both hands?”
I stop and turn. She nearly walks into me, catches herself, and tilts her head back to look up at my face. No fear in her expression, and no performance of courage either.
In the moonlight: dark hair pulled back and secured with a strip of fraying leather, warm brown skin, a single old scar running along the left side of her neck just below the hairline.
Her boots are worn through at the soles, the leather cracked along both insteps. Nobody’s offered her new ones, and she hasn’t stopped long enough anywhere to find a cobbler. The road she was on before this one was longer and harder than the road she’s on now.
“Fourteen months ago the tremors started. Ten months until it was both hands.”
“Worse in the morning or at night?”
“Morning.”
“After you eat?”
“I don’t eat much anymore.”
Her scent changes, the heat signature along her jaw shifting, and I’d bite through my own tongue before I accepted pity from a human woman who weighs less than one of my arms.
But this isn’t pity. It’s the look of someone confirming a number she already ran in her head.
“Okay,” she says. “Keep walking. I’ll ask the rest when we get there.”
