Chương 127: Chapter 126 – Haven't We Met Before?

The third patrol went the way the first two had. Priya talked, Marcus checked his gear at every stop like the ritual itself was load-bearing, and the anteater found one more rabbit warren to be personally offended by. Ant walked the loop with his legs settling into the rhythm of it, four hours that asked nothing of him except that he keep moving and keep his mouth shut about anything real, and by the time the gate came back into view he'd stopped counting the minutes.

"You're getting the hang of boring," Priya said, peeling off toward the mess hall same as every other morning.

"High praise around here, apparently."

"Only kind that matters." Mahkir trotted at his heel, ears up, tail low and easy, doing a passable job of looking like an animal with nothing on his mind but breakfast. Ant knew better. He always knew better. Four hours, Mahkir said, once Priya was out of earshot. Four hours and the most dangerous thing out there was a badger that took offense at the anteater's snout being in its business. I have fought things with more ambition than that badger. You fought a rabbit warren yesterday too.

The warren showed initiative. This was a badger standing its ground out of spite. The yard past the gate was busier than it had been either of the last two mornings, patrol units filtering in and out in staggered pairs, someone hauling a cart of feed toward the pens, two recruits sparring half-heartedly under a trainer who kept correcting the same footwork error without much hope of it sticking.

Ant angled for the mess hall and Rebekah's ledgers, already thinking about the bench by the window that had become theirs by default, when a voice caught him from the side.

"You're the new one. Ethan, right?" The man was maybe a year or two older than Ant, broad through the chest in the way of someone who trained hard and ate well, dark hair cropped close, a fading yellow bruise along one forearm that looked like it had been worse a week ago. He carried himself easy, weight settled evenly, a fighter's stance, someone used to being watched and long past minding it.

"That's me." Ant kept his own voice level, unremarkable, Ethan's voice, the one he'd been practicing since before they'd crossed the territory line.

"Do I know you?"

"That's what I'm trying to work out." The man studied him, not rude about it, just thorough, eyes narrowed like he was checking a piece of work he didn't remember finishing.

"You look familiar. Can't place where from."

"I get that a lot. Common face."

"Maybe." He didn't sound convinced.

"Corlan said you fought all right in intake. Said the two of you, you and your Kithren, didn't fall apart against Talia's usual first-week test."

"We got through it."

"That's more than most manage first week." He held out a hand.

"Ben." Ant took it. The grip was firm, no games in it, and up close Ben's eyes moved once, quick, over Ant's build, the same half-second sweep one fighter gives another without meaning to make it obvious. Ant had done the same thing his whole life without thinking about it. He recognized the habit because he shared it.

"You fight?" Ant asked, mostly to have something to say that wasn't standing there while a man tried to place his face.

"Used to, more than I do now." One corner of Ben's mouth pulled up, brief, gone before it became anything.

"Had a run at something bigger than patrol duty a couple months back. Didn't work out the way I wanted."

"Sorry to hear it."

"Don't be. Learned more from the loss than I ever would have from winning." He said it plainly, no bitterness dressing it up, which Ant found himself respecting despite the cold drop low in his gut at the word loss landing anywhere near this conversation.

"You're not from around here originally. Accent's wrong for it."

"Ashholt way. Farm country before it was anything else."

"Figured it was something like that." Ben crouched then, without asking, the sort of man who looked at every Kithren he passed whether he had a reason to or not.

"This yours?"

"That's Copper." The name came out of Ant's mouth easy, rehearsed a hundred times on the walk in, and he still felt the small lurch of using it, like a coat that fit wrong in the shoulders no matter how many times he put it on. Mahkir sat still under the attention, ears forward, doing his level best to look like an animal being looked at and nothing more. Ben reached out slow, the universal gesture for may I, and Mahkir let him, ears back but still, tail flat against the ground instead of lashing.

"Lynx-type," Ben said, mostly to himself, turning Mahkir's face a fraction to catch the light better.

"Red like that's not common. Most of the lynx-types I've seen run grey or brown, maybe a little rust through the coat at the edges. This is different."

"He's a mixed breed, chip says. Nobody's ever been able to tell me exactly what he's mixed with."

"Huh." Ben kept looking, longer than thirty seconds of hello usually bought a stranger's Kithren. His thumb traced along the ridge of Mahkir's jaw, over the exact spot where a collar had sat for the better part of a year, the fur there still lying a little differently than the fur around it, even with the collar gone.

"You said Corlan tested you. He run you through the standard drills, or something more."

"Standard, near as I could tell. Wasn't given a comparison."

"No, you wouldn't have been." Ben straightened up, slow, eyes narrowing a fraction, thinking about something or nothing at all.

"Anyway. Good to meet you, Ethan. Copper." He nodded once at Mahkir like the name mattered to him, and walked off toward the training yard without looking back. Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. Ant made himself walk the rest of the way to the mess hall at a normal pace. It took more effort than it should have. Rebekah was at their usual bench, ink on two fingers same as always, and she caught the look on his face before he'd even sat down properly.

She slid over without being asked, closing the gap so he had to sit close instead of across from her, and his knee found hers under the table and stayed there before he'd decided to let it.

"All right, out with it. You've got the face you get right before you tell me something's gone sideways, and I would genuinely rather hear it now than watch you work up to it for the next ten minutes while I pretend to read this ledger."

"Nothing happened. That's the problem." He kept his voice low, pitched for her alone, the way she always pitched hers for him.

"Man named Ben stopped me in the yard. Says I look familiar. Couldn't place it. Then he crouched down and spent the better part of a minute looking at Mahkir like he was reading something written on him." Her hands stopped moving over the ledger, ink forgotten.

"Looking how. There's looking at a stray dog and there's looking at something you're trying to place, and those two don't sit the same way on a person's face."

"The second one. He knew exactly what color a lynx-type's supposed to run, and Mahkir's wrong for it. Asked about the mark on his jaw without knowing that's what he was asking about." Ant felt his own pulse in his ears, steady but too fast.

"Rebekah, I think that's Talonstrike's handler. The tiger from the final. The one that evolved mid-fight." She didn't say anything right away, and when she did the easy edge had gone out of her voice entirely, dropped somewhere flatter and more careful.

"You're sure of that."

"I'm not sure of anything. I'm telling you what it looked like from where I was standing."

"Then we treat it like it's true until something tells us otherwise, and we don't sit around waiting to find out which." She closed the ledger, unhurried about it, nothing in her posture that would read as alarm to anyone two tables over, though every trace of playing to the room had gone out of her voice.

"Tell me what you want to do and I'll tell you honestly if I think it's the right call or just the fastest one."

"Keep Mahkir where I can see him tonight instead of letting him wander off pretending to be a lynx with lynx business to attend to. Have Lem stay close instead of ranging too, in case we need to move fast between one breath and the next." Ant kept his voice down, thinking it through even as he said it out loud.

"And if this goes the way I think it might, we don't wait around to find out how bad it gets before we decide to run. We just go."

"Go where, exactly, because I would love to know if you've actually thought that part through or if you're just saying dramatic things at me to feel better."

"Away from here first. Anywhere that isn't inside these walls. We work out the rest of it once we're not standing in the middle of the thing we're running from."

"That's one good idea wearing a very thin coat of a plan, but it happens to be the right idea, so I'll allow it." She held his eyes a moment, the tease not quite covering how serious she actually was underneath it, then let her hand rest over his on the bench where no one two tables over would catch it.

"You called that fast, for you."

"Didn't feel like there was time to call it slow."

"No, I don't imagine it did." Her thumb moved once against his knuckles before she pulled her hand back to the ledger, and the wryness climbed right back into her voice like nothing had happened to it at all.

"Try not to get us both killed proving yourself right about this one. I've grown embarrassingly fond of you, and it would be terribly inconvenient to have to go find someone new to worry about." Nothing happened that night. Ant lay awake most of it anyway, back against the wall same as the first night, watching the window and listening for footsteps that never came. Mahkir stayed alert beside him, not pretending to sleep this time, ears tracking every sound the compound made settling into darkness.

A man who's worked out that the tournament champion is sitting three doors from his own bed doesn't wait quietly until morning, Mahkir said, somewhere past midnight. He hasn't said anything to anyone yet. Yet, Mahkir agreed. Let's hope he's slow about the rest of it. Nothing happened the second day either.

Ant took the morning patrol and it was as dull as every patrol before it, the same tree line, the same marker stone, a different pair of legs walking it and no sign anywhere of Ben or the men Ben would have needed to bring if this was going the way Ant feared. Rebekah spent the day exactly where she always spent it, ledgers and ink, no change in her routine that anyone watching would have caught.

By evening the two of them sat at their bench with the tension between them worn thin from holding it too long without anything to spend it on.

"Maybe he genuinely couldn't place it," Rebekah said, not quite a question, the way she said most of the things she wanted him to argue her out of.

"Maybe." Ant didn't believe it and didn't say so, though the look she gave him made it clear she already knew that much. She turned a page she probably wasn't reading, buying herself a second before she said the rest of it out loud.

"Or he mentioned it to someone who laughed it off and told him he was imagining things, and he decided that was easier to believe than chasing a feeling around for two weeks." Her voice lost its lightness somewhere in the middle of the sentence, quiet by the end of it in a way that had nothing to do with anyone overhearing.

"Or he's still watching us both, quietly, being the sort of man who doesn't open his mouth until he's certain enough that it matters when he does."

"You don't sound like you believe the first one."

"I don't, no, but I don't get to pick which version's true just because it's the one I like better." She set the page down properly and looked at him, and for a moment the whole easy performance of her dropped away entirely.

"I did find something today, for what it's worth, so at least one of us made progress while you were making friends with tournament finalists. That routing mark I mentioned, the one paying out off the main ledger with no name attached. It traces to a warehouse two streets past the armory. I don't know what's inside it yet. I do know somebody's gone to a great deal of trouble making sure the paperwork never says."

"That's worth something."

"It might be worth a great deal, actually, once I've had more than one afternoon to pull at it properly." She reached for the next ledger in the stack, unhurried, though her eyes lingered on him a second longer than the moment strictly needed, the same checking-over she'd been doing to him all day without ever quite naming it out loud.

"You keep an eye on Ben. I'll keep pulling this thread. We compare notes the moment either of us actually has something worth comparing, and not a moment before, because half a theory said out loud too early just gives us both something new to panic about." She bumped her knee against his under the table, the same private contact from two days back, there and gone before anyone at the next bench could have read it as anything more than two people sitting close. It steadied him more than he expected it to.

He didn't say so. Mahkir found him at the window that night, same as the last two, and settled in against his leg instead of the corner he usually claimed. Two days, Mahkir said. He hasn't said a word to anyone that's brought trouble to our door. Hasn't looked at me again either, near as you've told me. That's what's bothering me too. Ant didn't have anything else to add to it. So which is it. I don't know. Ant let his head rest back against the wall, eyes on the dark yard below.

No lanterns left lit anywhere along the row of huts, no one moving between them, just the low creak of the cooper's shop settling under them the way old wood did once the day's heat left it. That's the part that's going to keep me up tonight too. He was still awake when the first grey came up over the wall, no closer to an answer than he'd been two nights before, and it was that thought more than anything, the sheer flat nothing of it, that kept his eyes open when every part of him wanted them shut.

The knock came at his door before the mess hall bell had even rung.