Chương 29: Chapter 28 - Twenty Paces Behind

The frustration arrived before Ant had fully decided to let it. He considered himself reasonably sharp. Every clan history, every bonding mechanic, every Kithren classification he could get his hands on — he'd read it, absorbed it, until he could recite half of it better than people who'd actually grown up inside that world. He wasn't slow. He wasn't naive.

Reading a room fast enough to eat that night took a kind of intelligence that never showed up on a formal assessment and mattered a great deal more than one ever could, when the alternative was not eating at all. And somehow, every single conversation with this woman left him roughly twenty paces behind, watching her arrive at conclusions he hadn't even started walking toward. She named problems before he'd finished identifying them and handed him the answer before he understood the question.

It should have felt reassuring, having someone that capable tangled up in whatever was happening to his life. Mostly it just felt like being permanently late to his own decisions. It was starting to properly irritate him.

"Alright." Sharper than he meant.

"Explain it, then. What's so obvious about my next move that I'm apparently the only person in the room who hasn't worked it out?" Maren didn't answer right away. She'd already crossed to the corner of the room, where a small refrigeration unit sat blackened along one side, its door warped from the heat. The hinges protested loudly as she forced it open, peering inside with genuine uncertainty about what she'd find, the interior light flickering before it steadied.

"Please still be edible," she muttered — half to the fridge, half to herself — sorting through it with the focus of someone who'd decided the crisis was over and the next priority was food. She pulled out a paper-wrapped sandwich that had survived marginally better than the room around it, held it to the light, unwrapped it.

"Want one?" Already biting into it. She gestured back at the fridge with what remained, entirely unbothered that they were standing in the still-smoking wreck of her family's laboratory. Ant shook his head, arms folded, waiting with the particular patience of someone who'd asked a direct question ten seconds ago and had yet to receive anything resembling an answer. She swallowed, chewed through the rest of the bite, kept him waiting a beat longer than necessary.

"Okay. Let's work through it properly." Another bite, talking around it with the same disregard she brought to everything.

"I'm going to assume, given today, that you're not going back to your old clan. If you were, you'd have gone there instead of letting a stranger put a chip behind your ear. That's not the behaviour of someone planning a reconciliation." Ant said nothing, which she took as confirmation.

"I'm also going to assume — correct me if I'm wrong — that joining someone else's clan isn't the plan either. You could. There are clans that'd take an unaffiliated Kithered adult, especially one as unusual as what you've got. Word of today will travel eventually, one way or another, and someone will come looking. You haven't gone looking first. Tells me you're not interested in being found." The accuracy of that landed somewhere uncomfortable. She wasn't wrong.

He'd thought about academies, briefly, on the path — dismissed it just as fast. Institutions asked questions he couldn't afford to answer, and every single one of them would eventually want to know exactly the things he'd spent the whole afternoon trying not to explain to anyone.

"Which leaves exactly one path. Unclanned. Travel, odd jobs, building a life from nothing, the way people do when every formal door's shut."

"That's not obvious," Ant said.

"That's what's left after you eliminate everything else. There's a difference."

"Fine. Inevitable, if you'd rather the word." She shrugged off the correction without a flicker, finishing the first half of the sandwich and starting the second like the state of the room around them had already stopped registering.

"Either way, it's where you're headed. And that's where I come in." She set the rest of it down on the least damaged stretch of bench and turned to face him properly, some of the ease dropping out of her posture — the way people straightened before delivering a line they'd already rehearsed once, alone.

"I have no intention of leaving my clan," she said.

"I want that clear from the start. Cerlan is my family, my work, everything I've built my life around. I'm not asking to walk away from any of it." A pause, choosing the next part with visible care.

"But I'm also stuck in this house, alone, most of the time, with nothing to do but theorise. I read records. I run simulations. I build models of how Kithren move through the world off secondhand accounts and archived data, because I've never once had the chance to actually watch it happen in front of me. Not properly. Not the way you get to, walking around with a bonded creature at your side. Everything I know is theory.

Everything you lived through this week is real, and I've spent every minute since you told me about it wanting to see it with my own eyes instead of reading a fourth-hand account written by someone who wasn't even there." If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement. Dangerous, Ant started to say, and she cut him off before the word finished forming.

"I know." Hand up.

"I know it's dangerous. I've been circling this idea for a while, if I'm honest — leaving, even briefly, seeing some of what I only ever get to read about. I've never actually done it. I've always been too frightened, too uncertain I'd survive a week outside the structure I've had my whole life. My family's name has always been enough of a shield that I've never had to build the instincts that keep people alive without one." She held his eyes, steady.

"You clearly have those instincts. That's the first thing that actually interested me about you, before I ever saw what your Kithren could do. I watched you turn to face two people twice your size, both trained, both bonded, and pick up a sword you clearly didn't know how to use — before he'd even shown himself. That's not nothing. Most people freeze. You picked a weapon. You can't fake that, and I've never had cause to test whether I have it in me at all."

"And then I saw Mahkir." She said his name like she was trying it for the first time and finding it fit.

"And that's reason two. I'm not choosing between them. I want both. The chance to see what he actually is, out in the world, not in a lab I've just managed to set fire to — and someone who already knows how to keep both of us alive while I figure out how to be useful instead of a liability." Ant turned it over slowly, the way he turned over everything, looking for the crack in it.

He thought about the house — the empty formal rooms, the parents who existed mostly as an absence, a young woman with more resources than he'd ever seen in one place and nobody around to share any of it with. Lonelier than her composure let on. He didn't find the crack. That bothered him nearly as much as the reasoning did.

"You've thought about this." Not a question.

"Properly. This wasn't decided in the last twenty minutes."

"No." No embarrassment in it.

"I've been circling the idea longer than I'd like to say out loud. You just happened to be the first genuinely plausible answer to show up."

"That's not entirely reassuring."

"I didn't say it to be reassuring. I said it because it's true, and you seem to prefer that to comfort, from what I've seen of you today."

"Let's say I agree." He kept his voice even, choosing the words before he committed to asking.

"What do I actually get out of it, beyond company. You've got money. Resources. Whatever's left of that lab once it's rebuilt. I've got nothing to offer you that isn't already yours."

"You've got him." She nodded at Mahkir without looking away from Ant.

"And whatever you are, which I still don't have a word for. That's not nothing. That's the most interesting thing to happen to me in longer than I'd like to admit, and I'd rather not pretend the interest is purely selfless."

"So it is about what I can give you."

"It's about both things being true at once. I like you well enough already to want this to work, and I'm honest enough to admit the reasons aren't clean." She shrugged, easy about the admission, nothing in her face suggesting she minded making it.

"Most reasons for anything aren't, if you look at them long enough." He couldn't argue with that either, which was becoming an increasingly familiar and increasingly annoying pattern. He glanced down at Mahkir, settled at the edge of the wreckage, giving the entire negotiation exactly as much attention as he gave anything that wasn't fighting or sleeping — which was to say, none. Whatever verdict Ant reached, it wasn't coming from that direction.

"I need to think about it."

"That's fair." She finished the last of the sandwich like the matter was already, in her own head, more or less settled. He caught the gap immediately.

"I said think about it. Not that I've decided."

"I know what you said." She wiped her hands on her sleeve, unconcerned, glancing around the ruined room with the mild satisfaction of someone assessing a mess that would need clearing eventually but wasn't urgent tonight.

"I also know you haven't said no. In my experience, when someone hasn't said no in the first thirty seconds, they're usually just working out how to say yes without it sounding too easy."

"That's presumptuous."

"Probably." Cheerful about it.

"I'm rarely wrong." He didn't have an answer for that either, and the absence of one was, he suspected, exactly the confirmation she'd just described. He looked past her, at the wreck of the room, at Mahkir dozing through the whole negotiation with total indifference to how it resolved, and let himself actually sit with what she was offering. Not just company. Not just protection from whatever the unclanned path would otherwise have demanded of him.

A future — an actual one, with steps in it, direction, a horizon past the next meal or the next place to sleep. He hadn't planned anything past survival in longer than he could remember. Every decision since the ceremony hall had been reactive, built around getting through the next day rather than shaping any of the ones after. The wasteland had been the one exception, and even that had been narrow: find the artifact, come back, see what happens.

He'd never let himself imagine further, because imagining further had always felt like inviting disappointment he couldn't afford. Now there was a further. Whether he wanted it handed to him by someone he'd known for a matter of hours didn't change the plain fact that for the first time since he was seventeen, someone was asking him what came next instead of just expecting him to survive until it arrived. He gave her neither the yes nor the no she was waiting for.

"Alright." He looked at her.

"Since you seem to have all the answers today — what's our first move?"