I have started timing how long it stays. This morning: all morning.
On the fourth morning, I eat my breakfast on the stone, he eats his across the hall. Neither of us speaks. The bread is the usual flat, dense loaf. The fruit and water are the same as every morning.
The light comes through the high gaps and moves across the floor between us. I watch the bar of light cross from my stone toward his. When it reaches the midpoint, he rises and goes to the lower hall for his morning work.
I go to the west corridor.
The debris in this section is older than anything I’ve cleared before. The roots have petrified into the channel walls. I have to use a flat stone like a chisel, working the edge under the hardened material, prying it loose in chips. Each chip takes a dozen strikes. My forearms ache by midmorning.
Around the third hour, something catches my eye on the main hall floor. I’ve come back for water. A spot near the base of the steps where he coils each morning. The stone is paler there. A rough circle with powdery edges. Dry in a way the surrounding floor is not.
I kneel and put my hand on it. The stone is colder than the flagstones around it. Something has been pulled out of it over time, I don’t know what, but the pale circle isn’t random. It has the shape a coiled body would leave.
I sit back on my heels and look at the pale stone, then the dark stone around it. The dead circle at the center of a living floor.
I sketch it on my evening sheets and add it to the growing stack of drawings in my pack. I have been mapping this building since my second day here. Every corridor, every junction, every channel. My mother taught me this. She sketched every place she entered, and I do the same, and I have not told him why.
In the afternoon he comes to check the section I have been chipping and folds himself down beside me where the corridor is too narrow for both of us. We have done this a dozen times now. The new part is that I have stopped pretending it is the channel I want him close to.
His arm settles along mine and he does not take it back. Neither do I. My heart is going hard enough that I am sure he can feel it through the scales, and I decide I do not care, and I let the quiet sit there getting heavier until I cannot stand it.
“You always go this quiet,” I say, “or is it just me?” He is silent a moment longer. Then: “It is you.” Three words, low, like they cost him something to let out, and I feel them land lower and warmer than the venom ever reaches.
Where his arm presses mine the warmth has changed. Closer than it was. Like a hand laid flat against the other side of glass instead of held above it. It soaks through my sleeve and into me and I do not move away from it. I lean the smallest amount into it instead.
We stay like that, side by side, both of us looking at the cleared groove and neither of us seeing it.
When he shifts his weight and his arm lifts from mine, the mark is vivid. A stripe along my forearm, deeper than the pink of the first days. There is a teal edge where his scales rested that I have not seen before. I push the sleeve up.
“Still pink?” I say.
He pauses. His eyes trace the teal edge. “Not entirely.”
He rises. I sit with the mark on my arm and wait for it to fade. It takes longer than yesterday.
On the fourth evening, he makes the flatbread differently. Something dark crushed into the flour before he cooked it. A dried berry. Tart when I bite into it.
“What is this?”
“It grows at the southern perimeter.” He is near the supply room, watching me eat. “The fruit dries on the branch.”
“It’s good.”
He nods. The nod is slower than his other nods. He looks away, then back, as if he wanted to see my face when I said it but didn’t want to be caught looking.
“Is there more?”
“Yes.”
“Put it in again tomorrow.” A pause while I decide whether to say the rest. “Every day, actually.”
His eyes hold mine for a beat. Then he goes back to his side of the hall.
I eat two more pieces. The berry is sharp and sweet. It changes the flatbread from something I eat because it is there into something I eat because Iwantto.
On the fifth morning he comes to the west corridor while I work.
“You map at night,” he says. “I have seen the lamplight.”
