Kallum
The north field was quiet in the morning light.
I moved through the tall grass, resetting pressure plates my hands remembered from the night.
Three of them had triggered. Three bodies to step around, already drawing the attention of small scavengers that scattered at my approach.
I left them where they lay. Let the others find them when they came back. Let them see what waited.
My hands knew the work. Check the mechanism. Replace the charge. Reset the trigger. Bury it again, smooth the soil, make it invisible.
My hands knew the work, but my mind was somewhere else.
The kitchen. The table. The warmth of ceramic against my palms and the smell of cold tea neither of us had touched.
Her knee against mine.
Warmth seeping through fabric. The press of her leg, solid and real. She hadn’t pulled away. I’d given her every opportunity, kept the touch light enough to be accidental, and she didn’t pull away.
What happens after?
Her voice, quiet and raw. Her eyes, green and steady, asking something she didn’t have words for. Something I didn’t have an answer to.
I’d pressed harder against her knee instead. Let my body say what my mouth couldn’t.
And she’d stayed.
I crouched beside a sensor node, checking the connections. Made myself focus. The morning sun warmed my back. Somewhere in the distance, a bird called out, unaware that the grass around it was planted with death.
But the focus wouldn’t hold. It kept slipping back to her.
The way she’d looked at me across the table. The tremor in her hands she’d tried to hide. The way her breath had changed when my knee pressed harder, the slight catch I’d seen in the pulse at her throat.
I’d wanted to reach across the table. Cup her face in my hands. Pull her forward and find out if her mouth was as warm as her knee, if she tasted like the tea she hadn’t drunk, if she’d make a sound when I kissed her.
The sensor slipped in my grip. I caught it before it hit the ground, fingers tightening on the casing.
Focus.
This wasn’t the time. Wasn’t the place. And still, I was crouched in a field of bodies thinking about the sound she might make if I kissed her.
I set the sensor carefully. Covered it with soil. Moved to the next position.
Tried not to think about her mouth.
Footsteps behind me. Light, deliberate. A rhythm I’d learned over five days of sharing her space.
I knew it was her before I turned. Knew the weight of her step, the length of her stride. My body knew she was there, and something in my chest shifted at the knowledge.
“Breakfast.” She crouched beside me, close enough that her sleeve brushed my arm. “And thoughts on the eastern approach.”
I made myself keep my eyes on the sensor. If I looked at her now, this close, with the morning light catching her hair and the smell of her filling my lungs, I’d do something stupid.
“You should have been a tactician.”
“I was a survivor first.”
She held out a metal cup. Steam rose from the surface, curling in the cold air.
I took it. Let my fingers brush hers as the cup changed hands.
Her skin was warm. Rougher than it looked, callused from years of work. I felt the texture of her palm against my fingertips, and I let the touch linger. A half-second longer than necessary. Long enough that it couldn’t be accidental.
Her breath caught. Barely audible. I heard it anyway.
She pulled back, and I felt the loss like a cold spot on my hand.
“The eastern tree line,” she said. Her voice was steady, but I’d heard the catch.
I’d felt the way her fingers had pressed back against mine for just a moment before she retreated.
“They came from there last night, but they bunched up at the fence. If we add a secondary trap line about thirty meters back, we can catch them before they reach cover.”
I forced myself to consider her suggestion. Forced my mind onto tactics, terrain, the geometry of killing.
She was right. The fence had created a natural chokepoint, but a determined force could adapt. A secondary line would make them slow down, reconsider.
“We’d need to mine the approach carefully. Make it look passable.”
“I know where the ground is soft.” She unwrapped a bundle she’d brought. Bread, dried meat, preserved fruit. Her hands moved with the same efficiency she brought to everything. “Where they’d naturally step to avoid leaving tracks.”
Of course she did. She’d walked this land for years. Known every dip and rise, every patch of treacherous soil.
I drank the tea. Hot and bitter, cut with something sweet I didn’t recognize. Simple. Good.
She was still crouched beside me. Near enough that I could see the fine hairs at the nape of her neck. Close enough that if I leaned forward, I could press my mouth to the curve where her shoulder met her throat.
I stayed still. Drank my tea. Didn’t lean.
“Eat something,” she said. “Then we’ll lay the new line.”
I ate. Not because I was hungry, but because she’d brought it for me. Because she’d thought about me this morning while I was out here thinking about her.
We worked side by side for two hours.
I’d worked alone for most of my life. Preferred it. The silence, the control, the certainty that no one would get in my way or slow me down. Even with the team, I operated at the edges, coming and going like smoke.
This was different.
She anticipated me. Handed me sensors before I reached for them. Held wiring steady without being asked. Moved when I needed space and stayed when I needed an anchor.
“You telegraph,” she said, not looking up from the connection she was securing. “Your shoulders shift before you reach for something.”
She’d been watching me that closely. Learning my movements the way I’d learned hers.
I watched her hands as she worked. The competence in them. The sureness. She twisted wires together with practiced ease, fingers moving in patterns Torek must have taught her.
“You knew what I needed,” I said.
“Observant.” She still didn’t look up. “It’s how I’ve survived this long.”
“It’s more than that.”
Now she looked up. Her green eyes found mine, and something passed between us. Something that had nothing to do with sensors or wiring or the trap line we were building.
“You’re different,” she said. “When you’re working. Calmer. Like the rest of the world goes quiet.”
“It does.”
“Must be nice.”
“It has its uses.”
I didn’t tell her that the world wasn’t quiet anymore. That she was in it now, a constant hum at the edge of my awareness, and no amount of focus could make her fade into the background.
She held out the last sensor. I reached for it.
Our fingers touched. Both of us holding the casing. Both of us still.
Her hand was warm against mine. I could feel her pulse through her fingertips, quick and steady. I felt the slight tremor she was trying to hide, the same tremor I’d seen in the kitchen.
I didn’t take the sensor. Didn’t pull back. Just stayed there, my fingers against hers, feeling her warmth and her pulse and the way she wasn’t retreating.
One second. Two. Three.
She looked at our hands. At the place where we touched. Her lips were parted slightly. Her breath had gone shallow.
I took the sensor, let my fingers drag across hers as I pulled it away.
She exhaled. Soft. Controlled.
I buried the sensor in the soil and didn’t look at her because if I looked at her, I would stop thinking about traps and start thinking about all the other things I wanted to bury my hands in.
The comm unit chirped as I patted down the last of the soil.
I pulled it from my belt, grateful for the distraction. Checked the display. Long-range scan data from the Turetsala, automatically updating every few hours.
The numbers made my jaw tighten.
“What is it?” she asked.
“New ship. Just entered the system.” I scrolled through the data, hoping I’d read it wrong. I hadn’t. “Transport vessel. Troop carrier configuration.”
“How many?”
“Based on hull size, twenty more fighters. Maybe more.”
She went still beside me. I didn’t look at her, but I felt the change in her body. The way her breathing stopped for a moment. The way her hands went rigid on her knees.
“That’s a lot of them against not very many of us,” she said.
“And Turnip.”
“And Turnip.”
She almost smiled. I saw it from the corner of my eye, the slight curve at the edge of her mouth.
The math was terrible. We both knew it. Against two people, a creature that was vicious but not invulnerable, and a farm full of traps that only worked once.
I could contact Rylos. Update him on the situation. But the team was days away, and they wouldn’t reach us before the second assault. It wouldn’t make any difference.
“You could take the Turetsala,” I said. “Run. The ship’s fast enough to outpace anything they have. Especially if I keep them busy here.”
She turned to look at me. Really look, the way she’d looked at me that first day when I’d appeared on her doorstep with Torek’s name.
“No.”
“Anhara.”
“I said no.” She stood, brushing soil from her knees with sharp, deliberate movements. “The Regalia is here. Torek’s work is here. Everything he spent his life protecting. I’m not running.”
“It’s not running if you’re the only one who can complete the mission.”
“Then you take the ship. I’ll stay.”
I stood too. Faced her across the narrow strip of grass between us.
“You know I’m not going to do that.”
“Then we understand each other.”
She held out her hand. An offer. A challenge.
I took it. Let her grip tighten on mine. Let her pull me forward until I was standing closer than I needed to be, close enough to see the flecks of gold in her green eyes, close enough to count the freckles scattered across her nose.
“Why?” The word came out rougher than I intended. “Why stay? You barely know me.”
She didn’t answer immediately. Her hand was still in mine. She looked down at our joined fingers, and something moved across her face. Something she was deciding whether to say.
I waited. Patient. The same patience I used on a rooftop, waiting for a target to appear. But this was different. This mattered in a way that missions didn’t.
She took a breath. Let it out slowly.
“I’ve known men my whole life who talked about honor.” Her voice was quiet. Steady, but quiet. “Men who made promises and speeches and grand declarations. And then when things got hard, when there was a cost to be paid, they disappeared. They found reasons. They found excuses. They left.”
She looked up. Met my eyes.
“You’ve been here for days. You’ve bled for a place that isn’t yours.
You’ve built defenses and laid traps and stood watch in the dark for a woman you don’t know, for a mission that might kill you.
” Her grip tightened on my hand. “You haven’t asked for anything.
You haven’t demanded anything. You just.. . stayed.”
The words landed somewhere deep in my chest. Somewhere I didn’t let people reach.
“Torek trusted you,” she said. “That’s enough for me.”
I didn’t know what to say. Didn’t know how to hold what she’d given me. This woman who’d watched men leave her whole life, who’d learned not to expect anything, who was standing in a field full of death and telling me that my presence meant something.
The warmth in my chest wasn’t dangerous anymore. It was just there. Real. Taking up space.
“Don’t thank me yet.” Her voice had gone rougher. Something raw underneath the steadiness. “We still have to survive tonight.”
She let go of my hand. The cold rushed in where her warmth had been.
She turned toward the farmhouse. Turnip appeared from somewhere, falling into step beside her.
I didn’t watch her go. I made myself look down at my hands instead. At the palm she’d gripped. At the fingers that still felt the echo of her warmth.
I pressed my hand flat against the fence post beside me. Cold wood. Rough grain. Solid.
It didn’t help.
I stood in the field with the morning sun on my back and the cold in my hand where her warmth had been, and I thought about what it meant to stay.
Then I went back to work.
There were traps to finish, and tonight was coming, and I had something to protect now that I hadn’t had five days ago.
Something that mattered.