Chapter 6
SIX
The words lived in her head.
I count them. Every person we extract. I remember each face. I do not allow myself to forget the ones we didn't reach in time.
November lay on the narrow bunk and turned the sentence over again. Not the words themselves — she'd memorized those within minutes. The way he'd said them. The stripped quality of it, like someone handing over a stone they'd been carrying in a pocket for years, worn smooth and heavy.
What struck her wasn't the counting. It was the not forgetting.
The deliberate refusal to let the ones they'd lost dissolve into abstraction.
She knew that practice. She'd done a version of it herself — not with people, with horses.
The ones she hadn't reached in time, the ones whose trust came too late, the grey mare in Montana who'd stood in the far corner of her paddock for three months before she'd let November within arm's length and then died of colic ten days later.
November kept those. Wrote their names in her notebook.
The notebook in her back pocket right now, with its small inventory of creatures she had tried to help and the ones she'd actually helped and the space between those two numbers that never quite closed.
He carried people the way she carried horses. The weight was different. The practice was the same.
She sat up. Swung her legs off the bunk. Pressed her feet to the cold floor and let the temperature shock push the last vestiges of sleep from her head.
Day two.
The dining area on the transport was a generous description for what amounted to a metal counter bolted to the wall, and three fold-down seats.
Rhaezon had decided it was safe enough for them to eat in the public area and November was hoping for a breakfast that didn't taste like sawdust and disappointment.
The table held a food synthesized that November quickly learned produced meals with the enthusiasm of a machine fulfilling a grudging obligation.
She figured out which settings yielded something edible and which produced something that looked like wet cement and tasted worse.
She shared this intelligence with Davn, and he received it with a single nod that she was learning to translate as the Kleotrian equivalent of a standing ovation.
She was on her second cup of something the synthesizer called tea and she called close enough when Rhaezon finally deemed the room safe enough for him to sit down as well. He took the seat farthest from hers, the one that put his back to the wall and his face toward everyone else.
"Morning," she said.
He inclined his head. Not unfriendly. Just efficient.
Davn produced a reading device from somewhere on his person. He scrolled through it with settled concentration as if intending to be fully absorbed and completely aware of everything happening around him simultaneously.
November ate. The silence was not uncomfortable, but silence was not November's natural habitat. She let it sit for several minutes out of respect for the hour, and then she started talking.
"I've only owned one horse of my own, but the first horse I ever worked with wasn't mine."
Rhaezon's gaze moved to her. A lateral shift that carried his full attention without any accompanying motion, the way a surveillance system might orient toward a stimulus.
"It was my neighbor, Mrs. Clearwater's gelding.
Sherman. Sixteen hands, a palomino. He had a bite radius that could take a finger off.
He'd been passed through four owners by the time I met him.
I was fourteen." She tore off a piece of the bread-adjacent substance the synthesizer had produced.
"Everyone said he was mean. My mother said he was scared, and no one had bothered to learn the difference. "
"Your mother?"
Two words. He offered them without inflection, but she heard the question beneath them — the invitation to continue, delivered with the minimum possible expenditure of language.
"She had this theory that every difficult creature is just a hurt creature that hasn't been given enough time." November looked at the bread and smiled at the memory. "She was right about ninety percent of the time. The other ten percent were genuinely difficult, and she loved those ones extra."
Davn's eyes moved above the edge of his reader. Back down. The faintest alteration of his mouth that might, in certain light, be classified as amusement.
"I sat outside Sherman's paddock for six weeks.
Didn't go in. Didn't try to touch him. Just sat there and talked.
I read books out loud sometimes. Ate my lunch.
He hated it for about three weeks. Then tolerated it for two.
On week six he came to the fence and put his nose on my shoulder and stood there. "
She watched Rhaezon absorb this. He absorbed things the way a cliff face absorbed rain — invisibly, completely, the evidence only showing later in what grew.
"That's when I knew what I wanted to do."
"Break horses?"
"No." She shook her head. "Horses don't need breaking.
They need someone to show up consistently enough that they decide the risk is worth it.
" She took a drink of her not-quite-tea.
"I became an equine behavioral therapist. Rehabilitation, mostly.
Horses that had been abused, abandoned, mishandled.
The ones nobody else wanted to spend the time on. "
His eyes stayed on her. They were dark and steady, and she could feel the weight of his attention like a hand on her shoulder.
"You left Earth," he said.
"Eventually. Turns out horses are wildly popular across the galaxy and nobody knows how to introduce them to new environments without causing massive behavioral problems on both sides.
So they started hiring human specialists.
" She set her cup down. "There's a bit of a legend about a human woman who ended up stranded on some backwater planet with a cyborg.
He was some kind of soldier, half machine, the whole tragic arrangement.
They fell in love, and he had horses shipped to their homestead.
For her. Because she'd grown up on a ranch and he wanted her to have that again. "
Davn's reader lowered a fraction.
"I don't know if any of that's true. I've heard four versions and in two of them she rides the horses into a battle, which — no.
But the part about the horses in space? That part's real.
I know because about two years after that story started circulating, I got my first off-world contract. Then another. Then six more."
She shrugged.
"People saw the horses and wanted them. Except horses don't do well on worlds that weren't designed for them. They panic, they founder, they colic on foreign grass. Someone had to go teach people how to keep them alive. That ended up being me and about twelve others.
"I spent three weeks on a Thelrian agricultural colony helping them integrate a herd of Morgans.
Before that I was on Sareth-IV, and before that I did eight months on a private estate in the Dalvaan system trying to earn the trust of a grey mare that the owner had imported and then couldn't get within fifty feet of. "
"For one creature? Eight months?"
"Eight months. She'd been transported badly — confined space, no gradual acclimation, surrounded by species she'd never encountered. By the time I arrived she was in full defensive shutdown. Wouldn't eat. Wouldn't drink unless left completely alone. Would charge anyone who entered her enclosure."
"What did you do?" His voice was quiet. That low register with the resonance underneath it that she could feel in the base of her throat when he spoke.
"Same thing I did with Sherman. I showed up.
Every day, same time, same distance. Didn't push.
Didn't retreat. Just existed in her space and let her decide what to do with that information.
" November turned the cup in her hands. "By month three she'd stopped charging.
By month five she was eating while I was present.
By month seven she let me stand at the fence.
On month eight, day twelve, she walked up and put her head against my chest and I stood there and cried like an absolute fool for twenty minutes. "
Something shifted in his face. Not a muscle, not an expression — something underneath the architecture of it, a plate moving beneath stone. He looked away. Looked at the door. Looked back.
"And then you left."
"The job ended. She was eating, socializing with the other animals, letting the stable staff handle her.
My work was done." She kept her voice even.
This was the part that always cost her something, though she'd gotten skilled at hiding the bill.
"That's the nature of rehabilitation. You build the trust so they can give it to someone else. "
Rhaezon opened his mouth to say something but paused before a word passed his lips.
Davn set down his reader.
November's cup was halfway to her mouth when she registered the change.
Not in the room — in Davn. He'd been a fixed point of contained quiet since they'd sat down.
Now something about the quality of that quiet had shifted.
His reader lay flat on the counter. His hand rested beside it, and the placement was too precise to be casual.
He looked at Rhaezon.
One look. No words, no gesture. Just his pale eyes finding Rhaezon's dark ones and holding them for a beat. November watched the information transfer, and what she saw was a complete sentence delivered in body language she didn't know but could feel the grammar of: direction, urgency, assignment.
Rhaezon moved to her side. Not fast — nothing about him announced alarm. He simply stood from his seat and was beside her in one strike, his hand hovering near her elbow without touching it.
"Come with me."