"Is that common?"
"No."
November waited. She did not fill the space. She did not push. She simply sat with her grain bread and her cross-leggedposture and left the silence open like a door she'd unlocked but would not walk through.
Davn looked at her. Looked at Rhaezon. Looked back at her.
"It is not common," he said, and stood, and took his protein pack to his cabin. The door closed. That was the end of the conversation, and November let it be the end without a single glance of disappointment.
She turned to Rhaezon. "He's lovely."
"He would not describe himself that way."
"People rarely describe themselves accurately." She bit into the grain bread, chewed, swallowed. "This tastes like someone compressed cardboard together and dared you to call it food."
"It is nutritionally complete."
"That doesn't make it a meal." She pulled her legs up tighter, tucking her knees against her chest, and looked at him across the small table. "Tell me about Aelthar."
He should not have engaged. He had committed, in the privacy of his own discipline, to maintaining a professional distance that did not invite personal conversation or unnecessary familiarity. He had a plan. The plan involved logistics, testimony preparation, security protocols, and the absolute minimum of social interaction required to keep a human woman alive and willing to cooperate for six weeks.
"What do you want to know?"
His plan, apparently, was already failing.
"Everything. Anything. What color is the sky? What does the air smell like? Are there animals? What do people eat — actual food, not this?" She gestured at the grain bread. "What's your house like? Is it cold? You look like you'd live somewhere cold. That's not an insult, just an observation."
"The sky is blue-green during the day. Violet in the evening."
"Two colors?"
"Binary star system."
Her eyes went wide. Not with the polished awe of someone performing interest, but with the genuine, unselfconscious wonder of hearing something remarkable and having no instinct to hide the reaction. "Two suns?"
"One amber. One white."
"What do the sunsets look like?"
"I don't pay attention to the sunsets."
"That's the saddest thing you've said to me so far, and you told me we were fake-married, so the bar was already high."
He looked at her. She looked back. The brown of her eyes was doing something specific in the transport's flat lighting — warming, deepening, alive with the attentiveness she brought to everything. He had noticed this in the hold when he first saw her. He was noticing it again now. The data had not changed. The effect of the data on his chest had intensified, which was inconvenient.
"The estate sits on a high plateau," he said, "on the northern range. The stone is dark and warm to the touch even in winter because it absorbs the heat from both stars during the day and releases it through the night."
"Warm stone." She said it quietly, like she was pressing the words into her own memory. "What about animals?"
He told her about the kethral. The highland breeds, heavy-boned, bred for altitude and cold and the specific stubbornness required to tolerate Drakon handlers. He had not intended to say more than two sentences. He said twelve. He said twelve because her face changed when he mentioned the animals. Something bright and sudden flared through her expression, and she leaned forward with her elbows on her knees.
"How many hands?"
"No hands, only hooves."
"No, I mean how tall to their shoulder height? Roughly."
He held his hand at a level that approximated it. She studied the height, calculations behind her eyes.
