Chapter 13
SERA
Blue light glows from inside the stone. It’s not much. Probably not enough to save anyone or even to prove anything, if a person is determined to be cruel about hope. But it is there.
A thin pulse glows beyond the rear crack, soft and impossible, blue-purple light breathing somewhere deep inside the fused stone. It answers the rhythm once, then dims until I think I imagined it.
But I didn’t. Kavor sees it too. I’m sure of that because his whole body changes.
He doesn’t lunge forward or make some dramatic warrior noise. He goes still in that deep, terrible way of his, as if every scale, claw, breath, and thought has turned toward the seam.
I forget to breathe. Then the light comes again. Faint. Blue. Real. My hand tightens around the water skin.
“No,” I whisper.
Kavor’s gaze cuts to me. I don’t know what I mean by it. No, because I can’t bear to want this. No, because it is too little. No, because it is in a place we cannot reach. No, because if hope has teeth too, I am tired of feeding myself to it.
The glow fades.
The shelter turns red-dark again, lit by the heat glare outside and the thin spill of second-sun fire crawling along the threshold. The air tastes of hot glass, dust, old mineral, and something sharper now, something almost alive beneath the bitter leavings.
Kavor turns toward the crack. I catch his wrist before I can think. His scales are cool under my fingers. Hard and alive.
We both look at my hand, and I let go first. Obviously.
“Don’t,” I say.
“I had not moved,” he says, his eyes meeting mine.
“You thought loudly.”
The corner of his mouth twists, only a little. Ridiculous, that I see it at all.
“The crack is too narrow,” I say, because I need practical words before the silence starts gnawing on things I don’t want exposed. “Too unstable. It might widen farther in, but not from this side. Not without tools.”
“We need to know what answered.”
“We do not need to wedge ourselves into a hot glass coffin because something glowed once.”
“Twice.”
“Do not be exact at me.”
His gaze returns to the seam. “It was epis.”
My chest does something painful. Small. Greedy. I hate it.
“You’re sure?”
“No.”
“Kavor.”
“I am sure it was glow. I am sure it answered from inside old stone. I am not sure what lies between us and it.”
“That’s not comfort.”
“I did not offer comfort.”
“Clearly.”
The ground stays still. The water skin remains between us, exactly where it rolled before the glow appeared. Even neutral ground has developed opinions. I nudge it back with my boot. It rolls half a finger’s width toward the seam again.
I freeze. Kavor watches. The skin stops. Nothing else happens. My heart beats too hard for a thing that is nothing.
“That,” I say, “is unpleasant.”
“Yes.”
“Does it mean something?”
“Yes.”
I glare at him.
“I do not know what,” he says, eyes still on the skin.
“You have a gift for making answers worse.”
“It is not a gift.”
“Practice, then.”
The glow does not return.
The crack is too narrow for even my arm to fit past the elbow.
Dark fused stone lips around it, smooth on one edge, jagged on the other.
A faint draft breathes through in slow pulls, cooler than the shelter, but not cool.
There is space beyond. A deeper cavity. Maybe a tunnel.
Maybe it is only a pocket in the stone where old heat cracked itself and died.
Maybe epis. The thought hurts again, so I press it down.
Outside, the heat is still climbing. The second sun has turned the slope into a white-red glare. The path out is impossible for now. Possible only if we want melted boot leather, cut soles, and cooked brains. Which I don’t. Usually.
“We wait,” I say.
“Yes.”
“We don’t crawl into anything.”
“No.”
“We eat before you say it.”
His gaze shifts from the crack to me. I hate that I gave him the satisfaction.
“I was not going to say it yet,” he says.
“Liar.”
“Yes.”
Something almost lightens between us. Almost. Then my stomach tightens around the word “eat,” and all the light goes suspicious again. I look toward the crack.
“If that is epis, why is it glowing now?”
“The rhythm may have woken it,” he says.
“Or whatever made the rhythm woke it up.”
“Yes.”
“Or it’s dying.”
Kavor’s stillness sharpens. I dislike that answer most because he does not reject it immediately.
“Epis can dim when it is weakened,” he says.
“Can it answer?”
“To certain stimuli.”
“What things?”
“Heat. Blood. Zemlja leavings. Pressure. Sometimes song, if old stories can be trusted.”
“Song?”
“Yes.”
I laugh once, dry and humorless. “Of course. Why wouldn’t the miracle worm-poop plant also have musical preferences?”
His head tilts.
“Ignore me. Hunger makes me charming.” I wave a hand.
“Hunger makes you sharp.”
“I’m always sharp.”
“Yes.”
Again, that serious agreement. Again, my chest doing something very stupid with it.
The shelter feels smaller than before. The blue glow changed it. Before, this was a trapped pocket under fused stone. Now it’s a threshold. A secret with a pulse. A thing we cannot reach yet, sitting behind my spine like a door I don’t have permission to open.
Kavor reaches for his pack, and I brace for the dried meat argument.
Instead, he pulls out the pale strip of ration I avoided earlier, along with a small wrapped lump of seed mash. Then he selects a flat shard of dark stone from the shelter floor and sets it near the threshold, where the heat glare almost touches.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Making it easier to eat.”
“That is not a thing.”
“It is.”
“You can’t improve that strip. Tajss already defeated it.”
He ignores me. Rude. And interesting.
He lays the pale strip on the stone shard, then sets the seed mash beside it.
With one claw, he scrapes a pinch of dark mineral crust from a safe patch near the wall, smells it, rejects it, and wipes his claw clean on dust. Then he reaches into his pack again and pulls out something wrapped in cured hide.
Not a City ration. Something darker. A thin coil, dried almost black.
“What is that?” I ask, narrowing my eyes.
“Cavern food.”
“That did not answer the question.”
“Dried sismis fat and root paste.”
My stomach makes an opinion before I can murder it, and Kavor hears. His gaze flicks to me, then away, because he has apparently decided mercy is pretending not to hear my organs mutiny. I hate him for it, a little less than usual.
“We are not wasting your food,” I say.
“No.”
“Good.”
“We are using it,” he says.
“That is wasting it on purpose.”
“It is food.”
“It is yours,” I say.
“It is ours for the mission.”
“No.”
His eyes lift. There it is. The argument arrives with dusty boots and a knife out. I point at him.
“Don’t.”
“I have not spoken,” he says.
“You are gathering words.”
“Yes.”
“At least scatter them.”
“No.”
The blue glow flickers once behind the crack. Both of us go still. A faint pulse glows through the stone. Once. Pause. Again.
The little coil of cavern food sits between us. Ridiculous, really. That something as ordinary as food could feel more dangerous than the hidden glow. Kavor lowers his gaze first.
“Eating is not wasting.”
“It is when we may need it later,” I say.
“We need it now.”
“You are impossible.”
“Yes,” he agrees.
He tears off a tiny piece of the dark coil and presses it against the pale ration strip. Then he sets both on the flat stone near the threshold. Heat begins working on the food almost immediately. The fat softens and darkens the dry strip. A scent rises.
Rich. Savory. Salted with something mineral and deep. My mouth floods. I look away so fast my neck hurts. Kavor says nothing. Smart male. Annoyingly alive one.
The smell fills the shelter. Not much, but enough to matter. Enough to remind my body that food can be more than fuel. That eating does not always have to be an act of accounting. That is dangerous. More dangerous than the crack.
“You did that on purpose,” I say.
“Yes.”
“At least deny it.”
“No.”
“You’re enjoying this.”
“No.”
“Liar.”
“Yes,” he says.
I stare at him. His eyes are on the stone shard, but that almost-mouth thing happens again. I should not want to see it in full, but I do. That’s another problem for later. I’m collecting them.
The ration strip softens at the edges. Kavor waits until the fat has melted into the hard ration and the seed mash has warmed enough to lose its dusty smell. Then he lifts the stone shard carefully, using claws where human fingers would burn.
He breaks the food into two pieces. Equal. Too equal.
I narrow my eyes. “You measured.”
“Yes.”
“With claws.”
“Yes.”
“That’s unsettling.”
“You prefer dishonest portions?” he asks.
“I prefer not being handled by geometry.”
“Then eat before I become more precise.”
The laugh escapes before I can kill it. Small. Cracked. Honest. Kavor stills as if the sound has touched him. I hate that he heard it like it mattered. I hate more that it did.
He offers me one piece on the shard. Not to my mouth. Not into my hand. Just close enough for me to take. Choice. Always now, choice.
It’s getting harder to hate him properly. I take the food. It’s warm, which is the first offense.
Food is not usually warm. Food is counted, carried, dried, split, hidden, stretched, swallowed before shame can talk. Warm food belongs in stories told by people who still have enough wood to burn for pleasure.
I bite. The taste hits too fast.
Salt. Fat. Bitter root. The softened strip no longer fights my teeth. The seed mash clings to it, warm enough to release something nutty under the dust.
My eyes burn.
No. Absolutely not.
No tears over food. There must be laws against that somewhere. If there aren’t, there should be.
I chew slowly because if I swallow too fast, he will know. He already knows. I can feel his attention held very still across from me.
“You are staring,” I say without looking up.
“Yes.”
“Don’t.”
His gaze shifts away at once. Too fast. Obedient. The food becomes harder to swallow.
“That was not…” I stop.
What? An order? A rebuke? A request? A plea?
The words tangle. Kavor waits. I swallow.
“Never mind,” I say.