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The second artifact is a truncated cone of the same pale material, no longer than my hand, lit from within by something that has no business still burning. Cut into the floor of the cradle, exactly where she said it would be, is the next bearing.

We are forty seconds from clear when the engines reach me.

Two boats, running fast and running loud, which means they aren't hunting us. They already know where we are. Somebody is being paid for speed instead of stealth, and that changes the arithmetic, because a crew that doesn't care about noise doesn't care about witnesses.

“Into the roots,” I tell her. “All the way under. Don't come out for me.”

“Draeven—”

“Not for me. Not for anything.”

I have four seconds of stored charge in the spines and eleven trees to use, and the first man off the lead boat never sees the water he's standing in. The second does, briefly. After that it becomes work.

There are nine of them. Three go into the marsh in the opening fifteen seconds because they came ashore in a line, which is what you do on a beach and not what a swamp forgives. The remaining six are better. They spread, they cover, and one of them is carrying a scanner tuned for thermals, which is the only reason the fight lasts long enough for me to make a mistake.

The mistake is that I put myself between the scanner and the root system where Clara is, rather than between it and the tree line. It's the wrong tactical choice and I make it without hesitating, and I will be thinking about that later.

A round goes through the outside of my left shoulder. Another opens my forearm from wrist to elbow.

They break at four minutes. Mercenaries always do; nobody at that pay grade is dying for a stone.

Clara is out of the root system before the second engine has finished fading, which is precisely what I told her not to do.

“Sit down.”

“I'm fine.”

“You're dripping on the artifact.”

That, apparently, is the argument that works. I sit on the slab. She opens the field kit without asking permission, and her hands are shaking, and they stop shaking the moment she has something to do with them, and I recognize that too well to comment on it.

“This needs closing,” she says. “The shoulder's a graze. The arm isn't.”

“It'll seal on its own.”

“In how long?”

“Two days.”

“And how much of the next two days involves swamp water?”

I don't answer that, which she correctly takes as the whole answer.

She works quickly and badly and then quickly and well, once she stops apologizing before every stitch. She works around the scales along the rim of the wound, lifting rather than dragging, which nobody has ever bothered to do for me, and she keeps up a running commentary about a boy in her class who broke his wrist on a slide and told everyone it was a shark.

I don't need the story. I don't stop her telling it.

Somewhere around the fourth stitch, something happens that I do not have a name for.

It isn't attraction. I've been attracted before; it's a simple system and I know how it runs. This sits lower and further back, in a place I associate with weather changing, or with hearing my own name spoken by someone standing behind me. My spines have flattened without instruction. My pulse has slowed rather than risen. Every part of me that spent nineteen years learning to leave a place quickly is, without asking, doing arithmetic about staying.

She ties off the last stitch and sits back on her heels.

“Done. You're going to have another scar and I'm choosing to feel guilty about it.”

“Don't.”

“I'm going to.”