No gray.
No change in texture.
Dessa’s fingertips were rough by the morning after our first contact, a subtle thing, but noticeable. By day four the roughness had become visible discoloration. Maret endured each contact with visible effort.
I pour her water and set the bread and fruit on her stone. She eats. She tears the bread with her teeth and looks toward the corridor where she was working yesterday.
There is dirt still in the creases of her hands from last night’s work. She did not scrub it out.
I did not take her hand yesterday. She held it out to me anyway. Palm up, the pink of my venom still across her knuckles, and she waited to see what I would do with it. Dessa flinched from the gray. Maret bore each touch like a tax. This one offered me the hand I had already marked and looked at me like shewas daring me to mark it again. No one has dared me anything in years. I keep going back to her face while she waited. Not the river. Her face. The part of me that should be counting what it costs to touch a human keeps losing to the part that wants to know what she would have done if I had closed my hand around hers.
None of this is about venom, or whether her skin can take the compound. It is the way she waited. It is that I have started listening for her in the corridors. I need to stop.
“Same work today?” she asks.
“Yes. The west corridor.”
She flexes her hands and hides her wince badly.
“There is salve in the supply room. Second shelf.”
“You keep track of my hands.” She means it as a jab. It does not come out as one. She takes her bread and goes before I can see what is on her face.
She goes to the corridor. I hear her start work, the scrape of stone on stone, the snap of dried roots pulled from the channel. The sounds carry through the hall. Small sounds. They fill the space more than they should.
I go to the lower hall for the morning pour.
The bowl is where I left it. I settle over it and put my hands over the rim. I close my eyes. The venom moves through my palms, pushed by will, drawn from the glands under my scales. A tightening in my forearms, a pressure behind my wrists, and then the slow drip into the bowl.
The liquid is cloudy. Amber at the edges. This is what my venom looks like. This is what it has always looked like.
I carry the bowl to the main channel entry and pour. The liquid disappears into the stone.
One pour. One entry point. Enough to keep the system fed for another day. Not enough to heal anything. Less of it reaches theseal every season; the stone between here and the seal is going the way of the floor where I rest.
I wash the bowl and put it back.
When I return to the upper level, she has cleared another ten feet of channel. She is in the corridor shaking out her arms, dirt on her hands and a streak across her forehead where she wiped sweat.
The corridor is narrow here. My coils fill most of the width. I stop to inspect her work. She leans back to show me the cleared groove, her shoulder presses against the nearest loop.
I should pull away. The secretion starts the moment her shoulder meets the scales. Through the cloth, into her skin.
I lean back, but she presses against me again, still talking, pointing at the groove, the depth of the carving, how the stone changes color at the lower edge. Her shoulder against my coil. Warm. Present. She is not aware of the compound, or she is aware and she is choosing not to move.
I shift my weight and the loop moves and the contact breaks. Later than it should.
She sits back on her heels, rolling her shoulders. Where the fabric pressed against my scales, a faint pink is visible at the collar of her shirt. Pink, not gray, not chalky.
She notices me looking and touches the pink spot through the fabric. Presses it with two fingers.
“That’s warm,” she says. “Kinda nice.”
She does not pull the collar straight. Does not go back to the channel. Instead, she rolls her sleeve up past her elbow and puts her bare forearm flat against the nearest loop of my coil.
She holds it there, and I am too shocked to move.
My venom spikes. The pink spreads from her wrist toward her elbow. The compound wells up where her skin presses against the finer scales.
