Chapter 12
Enslak
Seven days.
I counted them by watching the sun. Up over the trees. Down behind the mountains. Dark. Light. Again.
Seven times.
My head felt less heavy. Like someone had been sitting on my skull for a hundred years and finally stood up. Not gone. Just lighter. Light enough to think without everything sliding away before I could catch it.
No drugs here. No needles. No handlers with their chemicals that turned my thoughts to mud and made the world go gray at the edges.
Just this place. Just her.
Avalon. That's what she called it. I liked how the word sounded when she said it. Soft. The way her mouth shaped it.
I sat at the cave entrance, watching the forest. Behind me, she moved around the interior, tending to the supplies with quiet efficiency.
She hummed while she worked. I'd never heard that before, someone making sounds simply because they wanted to, because the sound pleased them.
Not screaming. Not orders. Not the wet noise of the pits.
Just humming. A small melody that drifted through the cave and settled somewhere in my chest like warmth.
I turned my head slightly. She was kneeling by the water containers, checking the seals, her dark hair falling forward over one shoulder. The morning light caught the angles of her face, the curve of her cheek, the way her jaw set in concentration when she was focused on something.
She was... I turned the word over in my mind, testing it. Beautiful. It seemed too small. Too ordinary for what I meant. But I didn't have a better one yet.
When she'd first come to my cell wearing Zarlak's face, I'd only known her by her scent. By how careful her hands were. By the quiet steadiness of her voice when she spoke to me in my own language and told me she'd come to take me home.
Now I could see her. Really see her.
Small. Much smaller than me, maybe five feet and a little more.
But she moved through the world like she'd forgotten she was small, with the easy confidence of someone who'd never learned to make herself less.
Her face had elegant lines, high cheekbones and a delicate nose, skin that looked warm even in shadow.
She'd told me she was from a place called New York, on a planet called Earth.
She'd told me a great many things in these seven days, talking in that constant, easy stream that had initially bewildered me and now felt as necessary as the sound of water.
Her eyes, though. Dark. Almost black in certain light.
Large and expressive, framed by thick lashes, and I had learned to read everything in them even when her words outpaced my understanding.
Fear. Relief. Sadness. Joy. A quick flash of humor before the laugh came.
All of it visible there, open as water reflecting sky.
I had spent a great deal of time watching her eyes.
She laughed often, and that still startled me each time. The first time she'd laughed, that bright, genuine sound ringing off the cave walls, I'd gone completely still and stared at her. She'd noticed and laughed harder, covering her mouth with both hands.
Laughter had become one of my favorite things.
She talked constantly. A steady, unbroken current of words that filled the cave, filled the silence, filled the empty spaces in my head where the darkness used to crowd in and stay.
Sometimes I understood her clearly. Sometimes the words slipped past me, meaning incomplete, and I could only catch the shape of things.
But even then, the sound of her voice was its own kind of anchor.
Like rain when you're already inside and dry.
I wanted to talk back.
The want was a physical thing, this pressure in my throat, words forming and dissolving before they could reach my mouth.
I could feel them in there. Complete thoughts.
Things I wanted to ask her, things I noticed about this place that I wanted to name aloud, things about her that I wanted her to know.
But when I tried to speak, what came out was fractured at best and silence at worst. The words got tangled somewhere between my mind and my mouth, stuck behind something I couldn't yet break through, and the frustration of it was a specific kind of anger that tasted like grief.
She never reacted with impatience. Never looked disappointed when I tried and failed. She just kept talking, kept asking me yes-or-no questions I could answer with a nod or a sound, kept treating my silence like something temporary rather than permanent.
I had begun to believe her.
"Enslak?" Her voice pulled me back. She'd stopped working and was watching me with that particular crease between her brows that meant she was worried. "You okay?"
I nodded and made a sound in my throat that she'd learned to read as yes.
Her expression softened into a smile. "Good. I was starting to think you were plotting something elaborate over there."
I wasn't. I was watching the tree line and watching her and trying to hold onto the feeling of the morning, the particular quality of light on the forest, the way she said my name.
I grunted in a way she'd learned to interpret as agreement to most things, and she laughed again and went back to her work.
I returned my attention to the forest, though part of me stayed fixed on her.
It had been that way since the first day here.
Some part of my attention always tracking her, aware of where she was, whether the sound of her movement had changed, whether she was close enough that I could reach her quickly if I needed to.
Taking care of her had become the center of my days. The thing that gave the hours shape.
Every morning I hunted. The forest was generous with prey once you understood its rhythms, and my body remembered things my mind had lost. Where to find the grazers in the early light.
How to move through the undergrowth without announcing myself.
The exact amount of patience required before the moment arrived.
I brought back meat each morning, cleaned and prepared, and presented it with what I could only call pride, though the word felt too small.
When she ate and made sounds of pleasure, when she looked at me with genuine appreciation and said things like Enslak, this is incredible, something in my chest expanded painfully.
I had also worked to make the cave comfortable in ways that went beyond the functional.
Soft grasses gathered for better bedding.
Flat stones arranged to create surfaces for sitting and working.
Firewood stacked in careful order. And, one afternoon, I had found flowering plants growing near the river, their blooms a pale violet that seemed to catch and hold the light, and I'd brought them back and placed them near the entrance where she would see them first when she woke.
She'd stopped completely when she saw them. Just stood there for a long moment, her hand going to her mouth.
"Enslak," she'd said, and her voice was strange. "You brought me flowers."
I wasn't sure if that was a question.
She'd crossed the cave and touched the petals gently, the way she touched things she wanted to be careful with. Then she'd looked at me with those dark eyes very bright, and she said thank you in a voice that made me feel the words differently than I usually felt them.
The days had a rhythm now. We ate together in the mornings, she talked while I listened, and in the afternoons she went to the river to wash while I stayed within earshot and occupied myself with the work of maintaining our camp.
She'd been very clear, early on, about needing privacy during those times, and the first day I'd followed anyway, unable to stop myself, had taught me something important about the difference between protection and intrusion.
"Enslak." Her voice had gone flat and careful in a way I'd learned meant she was choosing her words. "I need you to stay back. Not because you aren't safe. Because I need to be alone sometimes. Do you understand?"
I'd understood more than she knew. She was trusting me with something when she said that. She was telling me that her need for space wasn't a rejection, that it didn't mean danger, that she could handle herself at the river for twenty minutes without me hovering at the tree line.
We'd found a compromise. I stayed near enough to hear her if she called. Far enough that she had what she needed.
It wasn't comfortable for me. But her comfort mattered more than mine.
At night, she let me stay close.
That first evening, the temperature had dropped sharply once the sun went down, and the thermal blankets we'd brought from the ship weren't quite enough.
She'd emerged from behind the privacy screen in the oversized sleep clothes she'd fashioned from the ship's supplies, gray fabric that hung past her knees, and she was shivering.
I moved toward her slowly. Stopped at a distance she could close if she chose, or hold if she preferred.
"You're warm," she said, which seemed to be her deciding something.
She crossed the remaining space and sat beside me, and after a moment she leaned back against my side. A small sound escaped her, something between a sigh and relief.
I brought my arm around her carefully, keeping my claws turned away, aware of every inch of the size difference between us. The weight of her against my chest was something I didn't have language for. Small and warm and trusting, her head tucked against me, her breathing slowing by degrees.
"Much better," she said.
I pressed my face into her hair and breathed her in. Something that was uniquely her, beneath the soap and the river water. She smelled like safety, which was an absurd thought, but there it was.
She fell asleep within minutes. I stayed awake a long time, listening to the night sounds of the forest, holding her with the care of someone who understood the weight of what they were holding.
Every night since, we'd slept the same way. Her body tucked against mine, her breathing the thing that finally let me close my eyes.
I was careful, during those nights, to keep the line clear between comfort and something else.
She'd given me warmth and presence and proximity.
She hadn't offered anything beyond that, and I wasn't willing to presume.
The wanting was there, real and constant, but wanting and taking were different things, and she had been generous enough with what she gave that I had no interest in reaching past it.
My mind continued to clear in those seven days. Slowly and unevenly, like a path emerging from snow.
Fragments surfaced. A woman's face, older, with gold eyes.
A deep voice that had taught me the names of stars.
A place with tall structures and ships and a crowd of people who knew my name.
The memories dissolved before I could hold them, slipping away at the edges, but they came. More of them each day.
One morning she praised my hunting and I felt something shift, a door opening somewhere inside me.
The memory of my father's voice came with sudden clarity, not the words, but the tone.
The particular quality of approval. I reached for the words to tell her and couldn't find them, could only press my hand briefly to my chest and hope she understood that the memory had come back and that it mattered.
She watched my face when I did that and nodded slowly, like she'd followed the whole thing.
"That's good," she said quietly. "Hold onto it."
I intended to.
The afternoon sun was warm across my shoulders when I heard the sound.
I was at the flat stone near the cave entrance, working through the day's catch with the blade from the ship, when the distant rush of the river told me she'd arrived safely and the splash of water followed.
She'd been humming for the first several minutes.
I'd been tracking the sound without thinking about it, my attention half on the work and half on her, the way it always was.
Then the humming stopped.
I looked up.
The forest was quiet in the wrong way. The particular silence that wasn't absence but held breath.
Then she screamed.
I was already moving.