"Their temperament?"
"Difficult."
"Difficult how? Aggressive, spooky, dominant, shut-down?"
He paused. He had never been asked to characterize his kethral's psychology. "They do not trust easily. They test boundaries. The lead mare unseated three handlers last season."
November's mouth curved. Not a smile exactly. Something sharper. Something that said:I know exactly what that means and I am already interested in meeting this animal.
"I work with horses," she said. "That's what I do. Equine behavioral therapy. Cross-species introduction programs for alien worlds trying to integrate Earth horses." She paused. "That's what I was doing when the Crimson Ledger took me. I was between assignments."
He had read her file. He knew this. Hearing her say it — casual, factual, with the same steady tone she used for everything — landed differently than reading it in a dossier had.
"Your animals sound wonderful," she said. "The difficult ones always are."
She looked at him when she said it. He looked away.
She talked through the rest of the day. Not all of it directed at him — some of it aimed at Davn when the Kleotrian emerged for the midday meal, some of it simply released into the air of the common area as observation, commentary, a running narration of her own thoughts that she did not seem to require an audience for. She talked about the grain bread's texture with forensic detail. She talked about a horse she'd worked with on a colony world whose name translated roughly to "the one who bites the wind." She talked about the transport's ventilation system and speculated, with apparent seriousness, about whether the air recyclers were depressed.
Rhaezon did not encourage any of this. He sat in his chair with a datapad he was using to review security protocols for the estate, and he did not invite conversation, and he did not ask follow-up questions, and he found himself orienting toward the sound of her voice the way a plant tracked light — slowly, involuntarily, with his entire body shifting degrees toward her without his conscious instruction.
The corridor was dim.The transport had cycled to its night-phase lighting — a low amber that was meant to simulate an evening cycle and instead created the atmosphere of a tunnel in a power failure. Rhaezon sat with his back against November's cabin door. The engines hummed through the deck plating, a bass vibration that traveled up through his spine and settled in his back teeth.
His legs stretched across the corridor, bent at the knee to avoid blocking the full width. His wings pressed tight against his back, folded hard between his spine and the metal door. The left one ached. It always ached. He had stopped registering the ache as pain years ago and now catalogued it simply aspresent. His blaster sat ready in his hand.
He did not sleep. He had not planned to sleep. Sleep was a vulnerability he could not afford in an unsecured corridor on a public transport with a witness twenty-three centimeters of metal behind him who was, at this moment, the most valuable and the most endangered human in this sector of the galaxy.
The door clicked.
He was on his feet and turned before the sound finished — blaster in hand, body between the opening door and the corridor, every nerve lit to a frequency that made the air taste metallic.
November stood in the doorway in the clothes she'd been wearing, her hair loose around her shoulders. She looked at the blaster. She looked at him. She looked at the space on the floor where he'd been sitting and the shape his body had pressed into the thin emergency blanket he'd laid down as insulation against the cold deck.
"You're sitting outside my door?"
He holstered the blaster. "Yes."
"With a gun?"
"A blaster, yes."
She held his gaze. The amber night-lighting caught the brown of her eyes and turned them darker. She studied him the way she'd studied everything since he'd met her — without flinching, without performing the polite avoidance that most beings offered his scars, his size, the general warning system of his physical presence.
The door closed.
He stood in the corridor. The silence lasted three seconds.
The door reopened. November's arm extended through the gap, holding a blanket — the one from her berth, thicker than the emergency issue he'd been using, still carrying the heat of the cabin.
"If you're going to be out here all night, at least don't freeze."
He took the blanket. Her fingers brushed his when the weight transferred. A small thing. Incidental. The nerve endings along the back of his hand fired with a specificity that was entirely disproportionate to the contact.
"Thank you," he said, returning to his perch.
She should have closed the door. She should have gone back to her berth and slept and let him do what he was doing and not complicated the clean geometry of his vigil with her presence.
Instead, she stepped out into the corridor. Barefoot on the cold deck plating. She lowered herself to the floor beside him,her back against the bulkhead adjacent to her door. She pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. The corridor was narrow enough that when she settled, her left knee pressed against his right.
