Chapter 5
FIVE
The public transport was not designed for someone his size.
Rhaezon folded himself into the boarding queue behind November and Davn, shoulders turned sideways to avoid brushing the bulkhead on either side of the entry corridor.
The ship was a standard mid-range passenger vessel — Korvathi-built, older model, meant for beings of average proportion and average needs making average journeys between systems. The lighting hummed at a frequency that set his teeth on edge.
The air recyclers pushed out something that approximated breathable atmosphere with the enthusiasm of machinery that had stopped caring about its job several overhauls ago.
Three days. Three days to Aelthar on this vessel, because a direct military transport would have flagged their route in systems the Crimson Ledger monitored, and the entire point of moving November quietly was the quiet.
He had booked three sleeping cabins in a row along the port-side corridor of the mid-deck.
Not adjacent to the engine — too much ambient noise to hear approach.
Not near the communal areas — too much foot traffic, too many variables.
Mid-deck, port-side, where the corridor dead-ended at a maintenance hatch he'd already confirmed was sealed.
One way in. One way out. He'd studied the ship's layout before they'd boarded, memorized the sight lines, mapped the distance from their corridor to the nearest emergency pod bay.
Fourteen seconds at a run. Twenty with someone who didn't know the route.
"This one is yours." He stopped at the innermost cabin, farthest from the corridor entrance, with a bulkhead wall on three sides and only a single door. The lock was mechanical in addition to digital. He'd checked.
November looked at the door, then at him, then at the two remaining cabins stretching back toward the open corridor.
"And you're taking the one right outside my door."
It wasn't a question. She had a way of doing that — stating what she saw, flat, without judgment, and leaving space for him to either confirm or deny it. The space was generous. He did not deserve the generosity.
"Yes."
"And Davn gets the far end."
Davn lifted a hand in a wave without turning around. He pressed his palm to the lock and stepped inside. The door closed behind him. He did not comment on the arrangement.
Davn never did. It was one reason they had functioned together for ten years — the Kleotrian understood the architecture of vigilance without requiring it to be explained or justified.
He simply noted where Rhaezon positioned himself and adjusted accordingly.
Today that meant taking the farthest berth, the one with the least strategic value, because Rhaezon had already claimed the point between November's door and anything that might come down that corridor.
"Three days?" November ran her fingers along the doorframe, studying it the way she studied everything — with a calm, cataloging attention that reminded him uncomfortably of how she'd looked at him in the hold of the slaver ship. Like a problem she was interested in rather than one she feared.
"Three days."
"Is there food on this thing, or did you pack rations? Because I should tell you now, my ability to be pleasant deteriorates significantly without regular meals."
The corner of his mouth moved. He corrected it. "There is a galley on the upper deck. Meals are served on a common schedule. But until it's vetted, I will bring food to the cabin."
"You'll bring it."
"You should not be wandering the ship alone."
"Because someone might recognize me?"
"Because someone might recognize me."
That landed. He watched her process it — the recalculation behind her eyes as she reframed the danger.
Not just hers. His. The scarred Drakon lord who had spent a decade building an underground rescue network did not travel anonymously.
His face, the face that made most captives recoil, was also the face catalogued in Crimson Ledger databases with a bounty notation beside it.
"Right." She nodded once, and something shifted in her expression that he could not read. "Food delivery it is. I'll write you a list of my dietary requirements. I'm very particular."
"Are you?"
"No. I eat anything. I just wanted to see if you'd make that face."
He had, apparently, made a face.
November smiled and stepped through the cabin door. It closed between them.
He stood in the corridor for four seconds longer than necessary. Then he entered his own cabin, set his pack on the berth he would not sleep in, and began his sweep.
She talked.
Not constantly. Not the way some people talked, filling silence because silence frightened them. November talked the way water moved through limestone — finding the channels, wearing the stone smooth, patient and persistent and impossible to redirect once she had found her path.
It started over the meal he brought to the small common area between their cabins.
Protein packs and a dense grain bread that was standard tasteless transport fare.
November ate without complaint, sitting cross-legged on the low bench with her boots tucked under her, and she asked Davn about the markings on his face.
"They're not tattoos," she said.
Davn looked up from his food. His white skin and black stripes caught the corridor light in stark relief. He studied November for a long moment — evaluating whether the question was curiosity or something else. Whatever he found in her expression must have satisfied him, because he said: "No."
"Born with them?"
"Yes."
"They're beautiful. The patterning around your eyes especially — it follows the orbital bone. Almost deliberate."
Davn blinked. The silence lasted long enough that Rhaezon glanced over, expecting the Kleotrian's usual deflection — a change of subject, a departure from the room, the particular blankness Davn deployed when people got too close to the questions he did not answer.
Instead, Davn said: "Most Kleotrians have orange skin. Black stripes."
"And yours is inverted."
"Yes."
"Is that common?"
"No."
November waited. She did not fill the space. She did not push. She simply sat with her grain bread and her cross-legged posture and left the silence open like a door she'd unlocked but would not walk through.
Davn looked at her. Looked at Rhaezon. Looked back at her.
"It is not common," he said, and stood, and took his protein pack to his cabin. The door closed. That was the end of the conversation, and November let it be the end without a single glance of disappointment.
She turned to Rhaezon. "He's lovely."
"He would not describe himself that way."
"People rarely describe themselves accurately." She bit into the grain bread, chewed, swallowed. "This tastes like someone compressed cardboard together and dared you to call it food."
"It is nutritionally complete."
"That doesn't make it a meal." She pulled her legs up tighter, tucking her knees against her chest, and looked at him across the small table. "Tell me about Aelthar."
He should not have engaged. He had committed, in the privacy of his own discipline, to maintaining a professional distance that did not invite personal conversation or unnecessary familiarity.
He had a plan. The plan involved logistics, testimony preparation, security protocols, and the absolute minimum of social interaction required to keep a human woman alive and willing to cooperate for six weeks.
"What do you want to know?"
His plan, apparently, was already failing.
"Everything. Anything. What color is the sky? What does the air smell like? Are there animals? What do people eat — actual food, not this?" She gestured at the grain bread. "What's your house like? Is it cold? You look like you'd live somewhere cold. That's not an insult, just an observation."
"The sky is blue-green during the day. Violet in the evening."
"Two colors?"
"Binary star system."
Her eyes went wide. Not with the polished awe of someone performing interest, but with the genuine, unselfconscious wonder of hearing something remarkable and having no instinct to hide the reaction. "Two suns?"
"One amber. One white."
"What do the sunsets look like?"
"I don't pay attention to the sunsets."
"That's the saddest thing you've said to me so far, and you told me we were fake-married, so the bar was already high."
He looked at her. She looked back. The brown of her eyes was doing something specific in the transport's flat lighting — warming, deepening, alive with the attentiveness she brought to everything.
He had noticed this in the hold when he first saw her.
He was noticing it again now. The data had not changed.
The effect of the data on his chest had intensified, which was inconvenient.
"The estate sits on a high plateau," he said, "on the northern range. The stone is dark and warm to the touch even in winter because it absorbs the heat from both stars during the day and releases it through the night."
"Warm stone." She said it quietly, like she was pressing the words into her own memory. "What about animals?"
He told her about the kethral. The highland breeds, heavy-boned, bred for altitude and cold and the specific stubbornness required to tolerate Drakon handlers.
He had not intended to say more than two sentences.
He said twelve. He said twelve because her face changed when he mentioned the animals.
Something bright and sudden flared through her expression, and she leaned forward with her elbows on her knees.
"How many hands?"
"No hands, only hooves."
"No, I mean how tall to their shoulder height? Roughly."
He held his hand at a level that approximated it. She studied the height, calculations behind her eyes.
"Their temperament?"
"Difficult."
"Difficult how? Aggressive, spooky, dominant, shut-down?"