Sirath
Her heartbeat matches mine.
I’ve been lying in the dark for an hour, listening to her heart run on my rhythm, beat for beat, the bonding chemistry doing what bonding chemistry does.
The anger is still there from yesterday. Not at her, but at a cave I worked in two years ago, at the dust I breathed and didn’t think twice about, at the fact that I spent thirty years refusing to bond and the refusal was survivable until it wasn’t, and the thing that broke it was a job.
I don’t sleep.
Before dawn, I go down to the tree line, scrub and snow, the air so cold it burns my throat scales.
I find a hare in the brush, kill it fast, and clean it on a flat rock.
Good gutting work; I learned it from watching humans at the lowland markets years ago, their knives small and precise, and the technique translates.
On the way back I stop at the hot spring vent near the second switchback, steam rising from a crack in the granite, the mineral deposits crusted white and yellow along the edges. I chip a handful of sulfur crystals from the vent lip and carry them in my palm.
The hare because she called my food spite jerky and the words have been in me for days. The crystals because I’ve watched her work, and in her constant murmuring, she had mentioned wishing for sulfur. I can’t give her much. I can give her this.
I set both on the workbench shelf next to her notebook and don’t say anything.
She finds them when she wakes. The hare she picks up and turns over. “This is recent.”
“This morning.”
She sets the hare down and picks up the sulfur crystals, holding one to the light from the glow-stone, and her face does the thing it does when the science opens up in front of her. “Where did you find this?”
“Hot spring vent. Second switchback.”
“There’s a hot spring vent on the second switchback and you didn’t mention this?”
“You didn’t ask.”
“Take me there. Today. After the bite.”
“After the bite.”
She’s up before I finish uncurling, already at the workbench, already writing.
The morning bite is on her neck, the left side. She tilts her head, I lower my mouth, and the noise she makes goes through me.
She’s made this sound every morning since the first bite, and I can’t get used to it; my venom surges every time, and every time I have to clamp down harder.
Today I hold two seconds past the dose, and she doesn’t call it out.
She tips her head further and gives me more of her throat, and the surge that goes through my glands is so strong my vision blurs.
I pull back. She opens her eyes. Neither of us says anything about the extra seconds.
“The vent,” she says. Her voice is rough. “Now.”
The walk down is forty minutes. She keeps up, her boots on the rock sure and unhesitating. The morning is bright and cold, the sky clear.
I’m ahead of her on the switchbacks, and when the path narrows she’s close behind me, close enough that I can feel her body heat against my tail.
I know every foot of this mountain, two years of hunting and walking and watching the approaches: the choke points where the rock walls close in, the wide section at the second switchback where someone could camp unseen, the ice shelf above the eastern approach that would bury anyone underneath if it let go.
At the vent, steam rises in a column. She crouches at the edge and examines the mineral deposits, scraping samples into a vial, testing the water temperature with the back of her hand. I watch her work, the way her hands move, careful and certain.
“The sulfur content is high,” she says. “And there’s calcium carbonate in the deposits. This lets me split the killing half from the bonding half, no heat.” She looks up at me. “This changes the timeline.”
I don’t understand half of what she said, and I don’t need to. Her face is enough, the way it opens when the problem gives her something to work with.
“You’re pleased,” I say.
“I’m very pleased.” She stands and brushes her knees. “This is the first real lab resource I’ve had in ages. You’ve been sitting on a sulfur vent for two years and using it for nothing.”
“I used it to keep warm.”
“That’s nothing.”
She looks up at me from three feet below, and the corner of her mouth moves, not quite a smile, close. The mountain wind pushes her hair across her face and she doesn’t fix it.
“Thank you,” she says. “For the crystals. And the hare.”
“The hare is just food.”
“The hare is the first food anyone’s given me in a while that wasn’t handed over in exchange for leaving faster.”
The bonding response surges, and this time I don’t clamp it down. I let it rise, let the warmth fill my glands and sit there, and watch her standing in the steam with sulfur crystals in her hand and the wind in her hair.
The walk back is slower. She asks questions about the mountain, not her science questions but real ones: how long I’ve been here, what the first winter was like, whether I can hear the river from the cave when the ice breaks in spring.
I answer in short sentences, but something in the space between the sentences is different. Less guarded.
At the narrow section of the trail, where the drop is steep on the left, she loses her footing on the shale, and my tail catches her before she falls, wrapping around her waist and pulling her back to the path.
She grabs my arm, her fingers closing around the scales above my wrist, and she holds on for three seconds longer than she needs to.
“Thanks.”
“The shale is loose here.”
“I noticed.”
She doesn’t let go of my arm, and I don’t pull my tail back. We stand on the narrow path with the drop below us and the mountain above us, and neither of us moves.
Her heart rate is elevated. I feel it through the contact, her pulse against my scales, fast. When she lets go, her fingers trail down my forearm, and the touch leaves a heat trace I feel for the next twenty minutes.
We climb back in silence. The gap in the rock face appears above us, half-hidden by the granite shelf, and she ducks through first. I follow.
Inside, the glow-stone is still lit and the fire has burned to coals. The cave is warm after the mountain cold, and she goes straight to the workbench, spreading the new sulfur samples across the shelf next to her vials.
I go to the cave mouth.
The snow on the lower approach has fresh marks, two sets of prints following the same path the runner used days ago. They’ve come further up this time. The stride is trained, the weight distribution says gear and purpose.
I watch the prints until the light fades. They stopped at the second switchback and turned back. Testing the approach. Counting the distance.
“Two more,” I say when I come back inside. “Same path as the runner.”
She looks up from the sulfur. “How far up?”
“The wide section. Where the rock walls open.” I sit down near the fire. “They’re learning the terrain.”
“How long before they stop learning and start coming?”
“Not soon.” I watch the last light go off the lower switchback. “One scout, then two. They map and they walk away. That isn’t a force gathering to rush a cave. That’s advance work for someone who isn’t here yet.”
“How do you know they’re not here yet?”
“Because if they were, they’d have come.
You don’t scout a thing this carefully and then sit on it for fun.
Whoever wants you is far enough off that the watchers can take their time, and a party big enough to come up this mountain after me has to march from wherever he keeps it.
That’s not close.” I sit by the fire. “Weeks, before anyone tries the approach in numbers. Maybe longer.”
She takes that in, the way she takes in a result that changes the model. “Then we have weeks.”
“We have weeks.”
She nods and goes back to the sulfur, and I watch the glow-stone light catch her hands as she works. I don’t tell her the other half of it.
That I could go down tonight and end the two who left those prints, and that I won’t, because two bodies on this mountain bring ten more asking why, and ten more would come faster than weeks.
The watching I can carry. It buys her time to fix me, and it buys me time I have no right to want.