“Then why?” she asks.
“He was a risk,” I say finally. “And I don’t leave risks behind me.”
It’s enough. She is weighing it, testing it against whatever she sees that I don’t, then exhales quietly and lets it go, at least for now, turning instead toward the path ahead.
“We don’t have time to waste,” she says. “Zethon will move quickly.”
“Then we stay ahead of them.”
She nods and starts forward again, her pace already aligned with the path she’s chosen, and I fall into step beside her without hesitation, the distance between us settling into something that no longer needs to be measured.
The forest sucks us in more as we move, the ground uneven beneath shifting roots, branches catching light in fragments thatnever hold long enough to define the space clearly. It should feel like distance from the encounter behind us. It doesn’t. The absence of pursuit doesn’t change the fact that the structure it belonged to no longer exists.
“You expected that,” Aeryn says after a while, her voice quieter now, less probing, more certain.
“Yes.”
“The replacement.” She glances at me briefly, then forward again. “You weren’t surprised.”
“No.”
“That doesn’t mean you agree with it.”
“It means agreement isn’t relevant.”
She smiles at that, not amusement, something closer to recognition. “You’re adapting.”
“I’m continuing.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“No,” I say. “It isn’t.”
The path begins to rise, the incline gradual but constant, forcing a slower adjustment in pace.
Aeryn’s attention moves forward before anything visible changes, her focus narrowing that suggests that it aligns with something beyond the present terrain.
“They’re moving sooner,” she says.
“Zethon.”
“Yes.”
“How close?”
“Close enough that if we miss it, we lose them.”
She adjusts direction without hesitation, cutting slightly east through a break in the trees that doesn’t read as a path unless you already know it leads somewhere. I follow, matching the shift, ignoring the pain in my side as it tightens with the change in pace.
The ground narrows ahead, the terrain shaping movement into something more defined, less open to variation.
Another convergence point. I don’t question it. She already has.
35
AERYN
They don’t make us wait. That’s the first sign this worked.
