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He grinned and threw the stick again.

Ashter vanished after it, crashing through the undergrowth with no concern for dignity. I leaned my head back against the tree trunk and watched him disappear between two enormous ferns before he emerged farther down the slope with the branch sticking sideways out of his mouth.

I hadn't meant to stay this long.

After Alex joined me, we'd kept walking without any real destination until we reached one of the deeper streams, then followed it because he hadn't seen this part of Gledhi and I'd apparently become responsible for telling him which plants would poison him if he touched them. That had somehow turned into Alex asking whether every brightly colored thing we passed was deadly, purely to annoy me.

Most weren't.

A disappointing number of his guesses had been right by accident.

Eventually we'd stopped beneath the tree when Ashter decided he'd had enough exploring and flattened himself across my feet. That lasted until Alex threw the first stick.

Now the light through the canopy had shifted from bright gold to a deeper amber, and shadows gathered between the trees.

Alex threw the branch again, watched Ashter launch after it, then dropped onto the grass beside me with his back against another root.

"Alright. Back to the questions."

I groaned. He'd been doing this for well over an hour. Time got hard to track when somebody kept asking whether I preferred apples or pears, whether I'd ever been drunk, why I owned forty-three throwing knives, whether I could swim, what my favorite color was, whether Ashter slept on the bed, and, for reasons he refused to explain, whether I'd ever bitten another person on purpose.

The answer to the last one had disappointed him.

"No. No more."

"You don't even know what I'm going to ask."

"I don't care."

"One more."

"You said that seven questions ago."

"I've learned a lot."

"You've learned that I prefer pears."

"Important squad intelligence."

"You asked whether I'd ever fallen out of a tree."

"And you refused to answer."

"Because it was stupid."

Alex considered that. "I'm taking that as a yes."

I looked at him.

He smiled, and for some reason I found myself actually looking at him instead of bracing for whatever question came next.

Alex was hard to miss even when he wasn't talking, mostly because his hair was so pale it looked almost white in the fading sunlight, falling half way down his back in long straight strands he made no effort to control. He was built like someone who spent most of his life training, broad through the shoulders without the heavier build Corian or Halver carried, and there was something unfairly put together about his face when he wasn't pulling stupid expressions at me. None of that mattered much, though. His smile did.

Alex had a good smile.

It changed his whole face when it was real, pulling wider on one side and creasing the corners of his eyes until he looked less like an Apex Battalion member who could command all four elements and more like someone who'd never taken anything seriously for longer than necessary. He smiled enough that I should have stopped noticing it by now. I hadn't. There was something easy about it, like he expected whoever was looking back to join in rather than wonder what he wanted from them.

I realized I'd been studying him for several seconds and frowned.