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"Jade," I said.

The Zrake drew in a breath. Its fins brightened, and the muscles around its jaw tightened.

Jade stepped backward into the shallows.

Alex boarded first and released the crossing behind him. The shelf of mud collapsed into the channel. Halver shifted in the shallows and hopped over the side of the boat and reached for some pants, hastily putting them on then helping the researchers.

Jade stepped aboard. I followed and released my shield as Nykos cut the final rope.

The Zrake surged into the water behind us, wings spreading across the channel as it drove the boats away from shore. Alex caught the current before it could turn us sideways and forced the bow toward open water.

For several breaths, the Zrake followed. Its back broke the surface beside the stern, but the distance widened once we crossed the island's outer reef. The creature released one final call, then turned toward the shore it had claimed.

Behind it, more Zrakes moved through the trees, crossing from bank to bank and clearing every human scent from the ground around their new clutches. No weapons had been used. No Zrake had been injured, and no egg had been destroyed. Everyone who had entered the island with us remained alive.

Jade sat beside me with the route card folded between both hands. Mud had dried along one side of her face, a leaf remained tangled near the end of her braid, and Ashter had hidden beneath her sleeve now that spray reached the boat.

The boats entered the broader channel. Nykos counted passengers across the boats, then counted them again. Dannian checked the sample seals while Halver watched the water behind us.

Jade kept pressing the fold in the route card flat and then starting again.

"You have a question," I said.

She looked at me. "Why did you listen?"

"You identified the nesting colony."

"That isn't what I mean. You gave the evacuation order before I showed you the eggs. Before I explained the bark or the reeds. You didn't know how many adults there were, and you didn't ask whether I might be wrong."

The question was careful in a way her field commands had not been. She could tell a squad to move around a Zrake without hesitation, but she did not understand why the squad had trusted the voice giving the order.

"You said move," I told her. "We moved."

Her fingers became still against the route card.

She held my gaze, and her shoulders eased down a fraction, the tension she had carried since the ridge finally draining out of them. For a moment neither of us looked away, the boat rocking gently beneath the both of us and the shore already shrinking behind her shoulder, and something passed between us that didn't need a name yet to be real.

Then Ashter shifted against her wrist, and she blinked, and the moment folded itself back into something smaller and safer for both of us.

I felt the same pull beneath my ribs that had begun appearing whenever she forgot to guard every response. It was stronger now because it had nothing to do with protecting her and everything to do with the person she had proven herself to be.

Chapter Eleven: In My Defense

Jade

The Black Citadel smelled dry, and the dryness itself felt wrong. One moment the air had been thick with salt, wet leaves and the mineral pulse of the Water Rift, and the next I stood on black stone while the last circle of portal light folded into itself behind us. My clothes were damp, mud had dried into my boots and everything around me smelled of dust, lamp crystals and stone that had never considered growing moss.

Ashter poured from beneath my sleeve as though he had been waiting eight days for permission to exist. He stretched, shook himself despite being dry.

"You're being dramatic. You spent most of the deployment inside my sleeve."

Alex stepped around the sealed sample cases being transferred onto a guarded evidence trolley.

"That is the face of someone who has survived a great personal hardship."

"He refused to touch water."

"A sensible boundary." Alex's hand stopped halfway toward his pocket when I looked at him. Halver walked past, took the strip of dried meat straight from Alex's hand and kept moving while offering it to Ashter. Alex muttered about betrayal.