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He takes that the way he takes everything, without moving, and I watch it land, and I watch him decide not to say the sentence he keeps not saying.

“You should sleep,” he says.

“I should.”

Neither of us acts on that either, and outside the storm settles in for the night like it has nowhere better to be.

CHAPTER 12

DRAEVEN

The storm doesn’t break. It sits over us and turns, and somewhere past midnight I stop pretending I’m going to sleep.

Clara is at the window. She’s given up on the bunk frame, wrapped in a blanket Joren left, watching water come off the eaves in a sheet. Her hair is out of its tie entirely. There’s a bandage on her left palm that I put there two days ago and that she has not once mentioned.

I have been awake for three hours cataloguing the reasons this is a bad idea. They are all excellent. Nineteen days. A departure date. A contract I have already privately broken and a client I will have to answer to. Two artifacts still buried and someone with ten years of patience closing on both.

None of that is why I haven’t crossed the room.

“You’re doing the thing,” she says, without turning.

“Which thing.”

“The one where you decide something four separate times and then don’t do it.” She looks over her shoulder. “I teach children. I can watch a person argue with themselves from across a room.”

“Then you know what the argument is.”

“I’d rather hear it.”

So I tell her. Standing where I am, because if I move it stops being a choice she’s making.

“There’s a word in my language,” I say. “It has no equivalent in yours. It isn’t love. It’s older than that and it’s much less polite. It means the one my instinct has already chosen, and Kaleidians don’t get a vote in it. It arrives, and after that it doesn’t leave, and the whole weight of my culture says you do not speak it aloud until the other person has had every possible chance to walk away from you freely.”

She has gone very still.

“Because once it’s said,” she says, “they can’t unhear it.”

“Because the moment it’s said, every kindness they show you afterward is contaminated. They’ll never know whether they chose you or whether they were simply too decent to refuse.” I make myself finish it. “You have a ticket in twenty-two days. You have a school. You landed on this world four weeks ago and everything that’s happened to you since has been frightening, and people attach themselves to whoever is standing next to them when they’re frightened. That’s not a bond. That’s weather.”

“Is that what you think this is?”

“I think it’s what an honest man has to allow for.”

She puts the blanket on the table.

“Draeven, I’ve been reading a dead man’s handwriting for nineteen days,” she says. “Do you have any idea how much time that leaves for thinking?” She crosses half the distance and stops, and leaves the other half where it is, which is not an accident. “I thought about it on the causeway. I did it again under the shrine, which I admit was poor timing. I did it the whole way down that horrible well and most of the way back up.”

“Clara—”

“And I want you to notice something, because you’ve built an entire moral position out of not noticing it.” Her chin comes up. “You never once told me what it was. Nineteen days of an instinct you can’t switch off, and you’d have carried it off this planet and never said a word, and let me go home in September thinking you found me mildly irritating.”

“Yes.”

“That’s not weather.” Her voice isn’t quite steady. “That’s the most deliberate thing anyone has ever done for me.”

I cross the rest of the floor.

I stop close enough that she has to tip her head back, and I don’t touch her, because there is one more sentence that belongs to her and not to me.