And that sits differently. I look at her looking at the trophy and something that has been running at its usual forward momentum in my chest does a brief, unfamiliar thing, like a gear catching.
She means it generally. She almost certainly means it generally.
But she says it like someone who’s been on the wrong end of that gap—between what’s displayed and what’s real—in a way that has cost her something substantial.
“Yeah,” I agree, after a moment. “Me too.”
She looks at me, and this time the look is quick and a little unguarded, like she didn’t expect that answer and hasn’t had time to prepare a response to it. Then she does the thing where she files it and moves on, that rapid internal adjustment I’ve been watching her do all morning.
“Show me the rest,” she says.
So I show her the rest.
We do the full loop. Game alley, food row, the maze, the river path, the central stage still being rigged with its lighting and speaker towers. I do not take her to Ryan’s observation point on the upper deck because that feels like too much, too fast. She’d clock it as surveillance the second she saw the sightlines, and she’d be right.
She asks good questions. Practical questions about logistics and setup and crowd flow, and underneath them she’s mapping something. I’m good at reading people, and I’m reading her. There’s a purpose to her attention that goes beyond curiosity and sits somewhere in the territory of someone who likes to know where the exits are in every situation.
It should make me cautious. Ryan would be cautious. Archer is already cautious and suspicious and probably writing risk assessments in his head. I find it interesting. She is a person with context I don’t have yet, and I want the context, and the way to get it is not to ask directly—she’ll shut it down, I’ve already seen how she handles direct—but to be interesting enough that she keeps talking.
Good thing I’m interesting.
“You’re not from a small town,” I say, at the river path, where the trees come in close, the water sounds change, and the carnival noise drops by half.
“What gave it away?”
“You’re comfortable in crowds but you don’t relax into them. It’s a city thing. You’ve learned to use density as cover, but you don’t actually trust it.” I watch her from the corner of my eye. “Plus, you walked the perimeter of the ground before you engaged with any of the individual spaces. That’s not a small-town instinct. Small towns, you engage first and map later. Cities, you map everything before you commit.”
The pause is longer this time.
“That’s very specific,” she says finally.
“I’ve met a lot of people.”
“In Sweetwater Valley?”
“I’ve also left Sweetwater Valley, occasionally.” I pause. “The carnival circuit, before I settled here, remember? Three years on the road, different towns every few weeks. You meet everyone eventually.”
She glances at me. “You settled here for your pack?”
“Deliberately and with full information.” I look out at the river, the morning light cutting it up into moving pieces. “Some people are worth stopping for.”
She doesn’t say anything to that, but she doesn’t redirect either, which is her version ofacknowledgment, I’m learning.
We’ve stopped walking. Somewhere in the last few minutes we’ve come to a rest at the edge of the pier. The old boards are solid under our feet and the water below does its constant unhurried glide. We’re standing closer than we’ve been all morning. The path narrows here, the railing on one side, and I haven’t moved to give her more room and she hasn’t moved to take it.
I’m aware of this.
I’m aware of the distance between us—less than arm’s length—and the way she’s looking at the water with her shoulders slightly less high than they were an hour ago, which is a significant development. And the way she smells, which I’m not going to make weird by examining too closely, except she smells like something I want to stay near, something warm and cozy, and entirely at odds with the careful containment of her.
“Jack,” she says.
“Lola.”
“Why are you actually following me?”
I consider giving her a deflection, because deflection is my primary language and I’m fluent in it, but…
“Because you’re the most interesting thing that’s happened here in a long time,” I reply truthfully. “And I have a deep personal commitment to interesting things.”
