Chương 28: Chapter 27 - Flaming Lynx

Ant looked at Mahkir for a long time before he said anything. The obvious words kept dying the second he tried them out loud. He started with colour, because colour was the first thing anyone noticed.

"Crimson," he tried. Testing it.

"Crimson Something." Mahkir gave him nothing back — no twitch, no opinion, tail curling in its usual slow rhythm.

"No. Too dramatic."

"Ember." Quieter, mostly to himself, though not quiet enough — Maren was still at the console a few feet off, close enough to catch every failed attempt.

"Ember Fox. No. He's not a fox." A pause.

"Ember Cat." Nothing landed. He worked through it the way he worked through everything, methodically, because fire was the one part of this he was actually sure of — the burn behind the eyes, the low glow that never quite left the fur even at rest, the breath that had put out most of a wall an hour ago.

"Blaze." He tried it in his mouth.

"Blazeclaw. Blazing—" Stopped. Started again.

"Emberfang." Said it twice.

"No. Sounds like it loses in the first round." He tried Cinderclaw. He tried Scarletmaw, which sounded promising for exactly as long as it took to say and faintly ridiculous the second it left his mouth. He tried Redwick for no reason he could explain even to himself and abandoned it before it finished leaving his teeth.

"Red Fluffy Kit." The sound from Maren's direction was not subtle.

"Oh," she said, straightening off the console with an expression of pure, unrestrained delight, "I can see the fear now. Your opponent has a level-three Red Fluffy Kit." She pressed a hand over her mouth, entirely failing to hold it in.

"Terrifying. Whole armies will flee." Ant scowled at her, which only made it worse, and turned back to Mahkir rather than dignify it. He actually looked this time — set the easy words aside and considered the animal in front of him properly. Small. Cat-sized, or— He stopped. Looked again, properly this time, measuring against memory instead of habit. Mahkir had grown. Not by much.

But the legs were longer than they'd been in the cave, the shoulders broader, and when Ant tried to picture him small enough to ride inside a coat pocket, the way he had that first night, the image didn't fit anymore. Two inches, maybe three. In less than a week.

"Has he gotten bigger to you," Ant said, before he'd fully decided to ask it out loud. Maren looked up from the console, glanced at Mahkir, and went very still in the particular way she went still whenever something didn't line up with what she already knew.

"How much bigger."

"I don't know. A few inches. I only just noticed."

"Kithren don't grow between levels. Not visibly, not this fast — a Common-grade creature might put on some size over months of training, maybe a year, nothing you'd catch without measuring." She was already crossing toward him, crouching to bring herself level with Mahkir, careful not to touch.

"How long ago did you say he hatched?"

"Six days. Maybe seven."

"And he's already grown enough that you noticed without trying." She said it slowly, like she was writing it down somewhere behind her eyes.

"That's not normal. I don't know what it means yet, but it's not normal." Red fur with that faint burning quality under the surface. Sharp amber eyes. A presence that had nothing to do with his size — the way the room seemed to hold its breath around him even asleep, the way two academy Kithren twice his size had gone down without landing a single clean hit. Lynx. The word arrived with an old familiarity that caught him off guard. He said it out loud this time, testing it the way he'd tested everything else.

"Lynx." Maren looked up from the console.

"You said that different than the others."

"Different reason." He didn't look away from Mahkir.

"There's a variant, Shadow Lynx — not common, not rare either, prized for stealth over brute force. I had a cousin who bonded one, back when I still had a ceremony ahead of me instead of behind me. I stood at the edge of the hall watching him get it and figured my turn would come eventually. That I'd get one too."

"And?" Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

"And nothing came." He said it without dressing it up, no invitation to make anything of it.

"I never actually had one to measure him against. Just an old idea I never got to use on anything real." Maren didn't say anything to that, which he was grateful for. She just looked at Mahkir a moment longer, then back at him, and let it sit without trying to fix it. Mahkir didn't look much like a lynx, if Ant was honest. He didn't match anything Ant had catalogued in years of reading everything he could get his hands on. But it held together closer than anything else he'd tried tonight.

"Flaming Lynx," he said, slowly. Mahkir looked at him. Tail curled once. No objection — which, from a creature who'd made his feelings about Flame Breath perfectly clear the moment he'd had one, was as close to approval as Ant was going to get. Maren, at least, had stopped laughing.

"Flaming Lynx." She tried it against whatever standard she judged these things by.

"That works. It's evocative without being ridiculous, and it actually references the visual profile." A glance at Mahkir, properly considering him now, the way she had during the scans.

"Better than Red Fluffy Kit. Though I confess I was rather hoping you'd commit to that one. For the official record."

"Thank you for that input." He said the name again out loud, let it sit — and a colder thought arrived on the heels of it, one that had nothing to do with naming. She could see his stats. The realisation landed cold. She'd read the numbers straight off the screen a few minutes ago, spoken them out loud without a flicker of hesitation, and he'd been too caught up in the moment to register what that meant. Stats weren't supposed to be visible outside the bonded pair.

That was the entire foundation the reader lenses ran on — the reason people trusted the system with numbers they'd never say out loud to a stranger. The reason he'd spent so long telling himself that whatever else the world had taken from him, the numbers, when he finally had some, would at least be his. They weren't. Not entirely. He thought back through the afternoon and didn't like what he found.

Every figure she'd read off, every scan, the ease she'd moved between his data and Mahkir's like the wall he'd assumed was there simply wasn't. How much had she already seen that he'd never agreed to show her?

"How could you see his stats." He cut across whatever she'd been about to say.

"Just now. You read them off the screen like it was nothing." Her mouth twitched — half an apology, gone almost before it landed.

"Cerlan built the chip system. We keep override access — sensors built into equipment like this, for calibration, diagnostics. It's not available outside the clan, and even inside it, using this in the field is forbidden. Strictly. This is lab equipment. It's not something I could carry around and point at strangers on the street." That was meant to be reassuring. It wasn't, quite. Somewhere in a Cerlan facility he'd never see, there existed the means to read a stranger's private numbers off a screen.

"Has anyone else seen his numbers today," Ant asked.

"Before now. Anyone who isn't you."

"No." She didn't hesitate on that one.

"The console keeps a log — every scan, every read, timestamped, and I haven't sent anything anywhere. I wouldn't, not without asking you first."

"Wouldn't, or can't."

"Wouldn't." She met that one head-on, no flinching.

"There's a difference, and I'd rather you believe the right one."

"I don't know you well enough to believe either."

"Fair." She said it plainly, no offence in it.

"Ask me again in a week. See if the answer's changed." There was nothing to be done about it now, and the alternative — no chip at all, invisible in every way that mattered — was worse by every measure he could think of. Maren turned back to the console, fingers already moving, entering the classification with the same quick efficiency she brought to everything.

"There." A pause.

"Done." She turned the screen toward him. [Kithren: Flaming Lynx] He read it, then checked his own — the one that had been running unprompted since the cave, older than anything her equipment could touch. [Kithren: Mahkir] The two didn't match. He turned that over, an uncomfortable doubt settling in where a moment ago there had only been curiosity. Maybe Mahkir wasn't a species at all.

Maybe Mahkir was just his name — personal, individual, the way Ant was Ant and not a description of what he was — and Flaming Lynx was the closest the world's machinery could get to whatever he actually was. Two systems. Two kinds of truth. No way to know which one, if either, was complete.

He'd spent twenty minutes agonising over a name, and it was entirely possible none of it mattered — that the official record would carry a different one forever, chosen almost as an afterthought once the real answer had already been settled by whoever had named Mahkir long before Ant ever found him. Nothing to be done about it now. Entered, whatever it was worth, somewhere he'd never see and couldn't correct.

He let that sit a moment longer, then made himself ask the question he'd been avoiding since the lab first went quiet.

"Alright." He looked at her.

"What's the favour." Maren didn't hesitate.

"I want to go with you." The words came out fast — too fast, like she'd been holding them ready and just needed the door to open. Ant blinked. Whatever he'd braced for — money, some formal arrangement, a debt with real teeth in it — this hadn't made the list. He turned the sentence over, checking it against what he thought he'd heard, and found no version of it that made sense on the first pass.

"Go with me? Go with me where?"

"I haven't even decided what comes after tonight," he added, when she didn't answer straight away, the honesty landing somewhere between confession and warning. No plan. No destination beyond whatever came after walking out of this house. The wasteland was behind him, the artifact still unfound, his old clan still closed to him as it had ever been.

"It's obvious, isn't it?" Her voice hadn't asked for agreement. It had stated a fact, plain and finished, the way she'd stated his stats a few minutes earlier. Ant looked at her. At the ruined room behind her. At Mahkir, watching the whole exchange with mild, unhelpful interest. Whatever she'd already decided, he was going to need a great deal more than obvious before any of this made sense to him at all.