The knife shivers. The first tell I’ve seen from her.
“He’s five,” she says. Her voice has gone very quiet. “He didn’t know his name. He knew your code.”
She cuts. Inside of the forearm. Clean, shallow, a line about three inches long. The pain is bright and specific, nothing like a fight wound — smaller, closer, delivered by a hand that’s still holding me steady. Blood beads, then tracks down my wrist and over the cuff, and drips onto the dirt floor.
She doesn’t move. Her hand stays on me. Her thumb stays on my pulse. Her breath goes out of her all at once, and for a second, I don’t think she’s going to move at all.
Then she looks up at me, locking onto me with those unsettling silver-gray eyes.
“It’s how they got the magic out.” Her throat works. “They thought it ran in their veins.”
My attention is still focused on her, but for some reason, it’s not just because of the blade. Which is just about as fucked up as I could possibly be.
She sets the knife on her thigh. Still doesn’t release my wrist. She breathes out, slow, and I feel her thumb tremble once against my pulse before she lifts her hand away.
She sits back on her heels.
“He’s at the ranch now,” she says. Flat again. Iron back in place. “A healer has him. They call him Sparrow because nobody knows what else to call him.”
I should say something. I know I should say something.
But what the fuck do I say?
Her hand is off my wrist. And for some reason, absence is worse than the contact.
The silence stretches. She’s still there, watching. Waiting for something I’m not giving her — a defense, a wall she can push against. I don’t have one. There’s no right response to the reality of a boy who held up four fingers and seven because he thought that was his name.
“Say something.” Low. Not quite controlled. Like it got out before she decided to let it.
I look at her. “Is there anything I could say that would fix this?”
She blinks. Once. Something moves across her face — not the cold anger from before. Something that tells me this isn’t what she planned for. Then she’s on her feet, and the distance is back, and whatever that was is gone, locked down fast.
“Don’t tell me you didn’t know.” She stiffens. “I watched you at that stone. You knew. You just decided it wasn’t your weight to carry.”
She steps back twice, and I feel the distance stretch.
“Are you going to kill me?” It’s a practical question, I guess.
“I don’t know yet. Killing you is a mercy I haven’t decided you deserve.” Her lips tighten. They’re plump, and I don’t know why I notice that. “The ones at that facility didn’t die fast. Some didn’t die at all. Some of them are at the ranch now, learning to eat with a spoon and sleep without screaming. So I’m not giving you fast.”
She cradles the rabbit in one hand. Crosses to the door.
“I’m going to walk out. I’m going to bar the door behind me. But I’m going to come back. I don’t know when. Could be an hour. Could be more. You’ll sit here, and you’ll think about the boy who held up four fingers and seven. You’ll think about what he slept on. What his mother sounded like calling him home for dinner, if he ever had one. What his name was before you gave him a code.”
She pauses.
“When I come back, you’re going to tell me whether the corridor was worth it. Whether those people deserved what you did.”
She sets the rabbit on the floor. Button eyes facing me. Matted fur.
“Wait—”
She doesn’t.
The door opens. Closes. A bar scrapes into place outside — timber settling into its brackets. The cabin is empty except for me. My arm is bleeding. The pull of her scent thinning slowly in the air.
I sink back into my seat and consider my options. There aren’t many right now, but I twist against the cuffs she’s bound me with, ignoring the mark she left on me that means more than my pain.