Not perfume — she didn't wear any. Something underneath that. Her scent was skin-warm, faintly sweet, leaving its presence in the fibers like a thumbprint in wet clay. He had, withhis Drakon senses, an extraordinarily precise rendering of it — every note, every layer, the way it changed at the edges where it met the transport's recycled air — and no word for what it did to the space behind his sternum.
He pulled the blanket closer.
The corridor stretched ahead of him: empty, sealed at the far end, Davn silent behind his closed door, November silent behind hers. Two more days to Aelthar. Six weeks of proximity. Then testimony, tribunal, and a transport back to Earth for a woman who sat on floors and called him good like she had evidence.
He pulled the blanket closer still. Let the scent settle into the air he was breathing. He did not name what he was doing, did not examine it.
Three days.
He sat in the amber dark and began to count them.
SIX
The words lived in her head.
I count them. Every person we extract. I remember each face. I do not allow myself to forget the ones we didn't reach in time.
November lay on the narrow bunk and turned the sentence over again. Not the words themselves — she'd memorized those within minutes. The way he'd said them. The stripped quality of it, like someone handing over a stone they'd been carrying in a pocket for years, worn smooth and heavy.
What struck her wasn't the counting. It was thenot forgetting. The deliberate refusal to let the ones they'd lost dissolve into abstraction. She knew that practice. She'd done a version of it herself — not with people, with horses. The ones she hadn't reached in time, the ones whose trust came too late, the grey mare in Montana who'd stood in the far corner of her paddock for three months before she'd let November within arm's length and then died of colic ten days later. November kept those. Wrote their names in her notebook. The notebook in her back pocket right now, with its small inventory of creatures she had tried to help and the ones she'd actually helped and the space between those two numbers that never quite closed.
He carried people the way she carried horses. The weight was different. The practice was the same.
She sat up. Swung her legs off the bunk. Pressed her feet to the cold floor and let the temperature shock push the last vestiges of sleep from her head.
Day two.
The dining areaon the transport was a generous description for what amounted to a metal counter bolted to the wall, and three fold-down seats. Rhaezon had decided it was safe enough for them to eat in the public area and November was hoping for a breakfast that didn't taste like sawdust and disappointment.
The table held a food synthesized that November quickly learned produced meals with the enthusiasm of a machine fulfilling a grudging obligation. She figured out which settings yielded something edible and which produced something that looked like wet cement and tasted worse. She shared this intelligence with Davn, and he received it with a single nod that she was learning to translate as the Kleotrian equivalent of a standing ovation.
She was on her second cup of something the synthesizer called tea and she calledclose enoughwhen Rhaezon finally deemed the room safe enough for him to sit down as well. He took the seat farthest from hers, the one that put his back to the wall and his face toward everyone else.
"Morning," she said.
He inclined his head. Not unfriendly. Just efficient.
Davn produced a reading device from somewhere on his person. He scrolled through it with settled concentration as if intending to be fully absorbed and completely aware of everything happening around him simultaneously.
November ate. The silence was not uncomfortable, but silence was not November's natural habitat. She let it sit for several minutes out of respect for the hour, and then she started talking.
"I've only owned one horse of my own, but the first horse I ever worked with wasn't mine."
Rhaezon's gaze moved to her. A lateral shift that carried his full attention without any accompanying motion, the way a surveillance system might orient toward a stimulus.
"It was my neighbor, Mrs. Clearwater's gelding. Sherman. Sixteen hands, a palomino. He had a bite radius that could take a finger off. He'd been passed through four owners by the time I met him. I was fourteen." She tore off a piece of the bread-adjacent substance the synthesizer had produced. "Everyone said he was mean. My mother said he was scared, and no one had bothered to learn the difference."
"Your mother?"
Two words. He offered them without inflection, but she heard the question beneath them — the invitation to continue, delivered with the minimum possible expenditure of language.
"She had this theory that every difficult creature is just a hurt creature that hasn't been given enough time." November looked at the bread and smiled at the memory. "She was right about ninety percent of the time. The other ten percent were genuinely difficult, and she loved those ones extra."
Davn's eyes moved above the edge of his reader. Back down. The faintest alteration of his mouth that might, in certain light, be classified as amusement.
"I sat outside Sherman's paddock for six weeks. Didn't go in. Didn't try to touch him. Just sat there and talked. I read books out loud sometimes. Ate my lunch. He hated it for about three weeks. Then tolerated it for two. On week six he came to the fence and put his nose on my shoulder and stood there."
She watched Rhaezon absorb this. He absorbed things the way a cliff face absorbed rain — invisibly, completely, the evidence only showing later in what grew.
