Page 49

Jade

Two weeks after joining Nephrite, I had stopped feeling as though every room in the house belonged to somebody else.

Mostly.

There were still moments when I caught myself standing in front of a cupboard wondering whether the food inside technically counted as communal, or hesitating before taking the last clean towel from the washroom because somebody else might need it more. The difference was that I usually noticed what I was doing now, became irritated with myself and took whatever I had been reaching for anyway.

Corian had stopped answering permission questions altogether. The first time I'd asked whether I could use the rear training yard after dinner, he'd looked at me for several seconds before saying.

"I'm going to pretend you didn't ask me that."

I'd told him that wasn't an answer.

He'd said that was the point.

The rest of Nephrite had become easier too, although I wasn't sure when that had happened. There hadn't been one moment when I'd suddenly decided I understood them. It had come in pieces.

Alex talked when he was happy, bored, irritated, hungry, tired or breathing, but I had learned that most of his questions didn't require careful answers. Sometimes he asked things simply because the thought had entered his head and keeping thoughts inside it wasn't one of his strengths. He left food on the corner of the table when he thought I'd missed a meal and never mentioned doing it. He also still touched things that weren't his, which meant I had slapped his hand away from my knives four times in two weeks.

Nykos was easier once I stopped assuming every scowl meant he hated whoever happened to be nearest. Sometimes he was irritated. Sometimes the telepathy made crowded places unpleasant and he needed everyone to be quiet. Sometimes Alex was talking. The third reason accounted for an impressive percentage of his bad moods. He still looked personally offended by the fact he couldn't sense me, but he no longer treated it as a problem I was expected to solve for him.

Halver had turned out to be the easiest of them to exist beside. He didn't fill silence simply because it was there, didn't stare when I stopped speaking halfway through a thought and had developed the habit of moving things onto lower shelves without acknowledging that I was five foot two and the kitchen had been designed by giants. I had noticed. I had chosen not to mention it.

He'd also figured out, within the first week, that I couldn't cook. Not unpracticed. The first time I tried, I turned rice into something closer to cement, and Halver ate it without a word, which told me exactly how seriously he intended to fix it. After that he started handing me small jobs while he cooked: how to hold a knife that wasn't meant to be thrown, how long an onion needed before it stopped attacking my eyes, which pan actually needed watching and which one could be ignored. He never called it a lesson. He just made room at the counter and let me stand there until I stopped getting in his way.

Last night I cooked dinner alone, start to finish. Halver sat at the table through all of it, watching me not ruin anything, and didn't offer to help once.

And Corian...

Corian was more complicated.

Not because I didn't understand him.

I was beginning to.

That was the problem.

The common room had been taken over by deployment equipment. Packs sat open across the floor, field armor hung over the backs of chairs and several waterproof cases had been stacked beside the front door. We were leaving the following morning for a small assignment at Estarith Bay, escorting a Citadel research team while they surveyed a section of newly altered terrain on one of its islands in the water rift. Small deployment but still my first.

Everyone kept using that phrase as though attaching small to deployment made it less interesting.

I'd read the briefing twice.

The research group wanted water, soil, plant and animal samples from an area that had changed substantially since its last survey. Rift saturation had increased through several connected pools, altering the surrounding ecosystem quickly enough that the Citadel wanted new records before the guild harvesting groups were permitted anywhere near it.

Nephrite's job was simple. Get the researchers in, keep them alive while they poked things they probably shouldn't poke, then bring them back out. I was looking forward to it far more than I wanted to admit.

My field pack lay open on the floor in front of me while I checked the contents for the third time. Two spare uniforms, waterproof outer layer, medical supplies I probably wouldn't need but had packed because people expected healers to carry bandages even when they could close wounds with their hands, ration packets, Water crystals, knife maintenance kit and enough spare blades to make Alex ask whether I intended to personally offend every creature in the Water Rift. I'd told him only the unpleasant ones.

"That's the fourth time you've counted those."

I looked up.

Corian stood on the other side of the common room with one hand resting on the back of the sofa. He had changed out of the standard training uniform into leather field pants and a black shirt, the sleeves pushed halfway up his forearms while he sorted the last of his equipment. His blond hair was tied back in the same knot he always wore, which remained unfortunate.

It shouldn't have suited him.

It did, which was irritating for reasons I wasn't examining.