Her hands move with quiet efficiency, straightening the front, securing what I left undone, her touch brief each time, controlled, but not careless.
When she steps back, the distance returns fully.
“This still doesn’t change anything,” she says again, quieter now.
“No,” I agree.
We leave it there. Because anything more would require honesty neither of us is willing to offer.
She turns first. Takes the lead without asking.
I follow.
And this time, the silence between us holds something entirely different, something neither of us names, and neither of us forgets.
21
AERYN
The memory of his mouth does not fade the way it should. It lingers in the quiet spaces between thought, returning at the most inconvenient moments, not as something sharp or overwhelming, but as something steady, persistent, woven into my awareness that refuses to be dismissed as easily as everything else I have learned to suppress.
I tell myself it is distraction, that it is no different from any other lapse in judgment brought on by exhaustion, by proximity, by the constant pressure of surviving beside someone I should never have allowed this close.
That explanation would be easier. It would also be a lie.
The forest moves around us in long stretches of travel that blur into one another, days passing without clear division, marked only by the gradual shift in terrain and the slow deepening of something between us that neither of us acknowledges directly.
We do not speak about what happened. We do not need to. It exists in smaller things now, in the way our shoulders brush when the path narrows, in the way his hand finds my elbow when the ground turns uneven and lingers half a second longerthan necessary, in the quiet awareness of each other that has become constant rather than calculated.
I let it exist. Carefully. Without naming it. Because naming it would require trust. And trust is still a variable I have not solved.
So I test something else instead, because I owe him the benefit of the doubt. I want to trust him.
The visions come as they always do, uninvited, unpredictable, pressing against my thoughts with that familiar insistence, but I no longer surrender to them blindly. I begin to separate them, to hold them at a distance long enough to examine their shape before I act on them, searching for the subtle differences I have started to recognize, the unnatural clarity, the imposed urgency, the way certain outcomes feel forced rather than discovered.
It begins small.
A shift in the ground ahead. A minor collapse along a narrow stretch of path that would force us to detour, costing time, nothing more. The vision presents itself sharply, too sharply, every detail aligned with the expectation that I will intervene.
I do not. I keep walking.
Vaedros follows without question. The ground holds. Nothing changes.
I do not react outwardly, but the confirmation settles inside me with quiet precision, another piece aligning with what I am beginning to understand.
Not every vision belongs to me. That realization should terrify me. Instead, it steadies something. Now I know that every vision of him betraying me is different from the others. Somehow it feels forced and it's always accompanied by that presence…Should I tell him about it?
Over the next few days, I continue. I test what I can without risking anything that would matter beyond inconvenience, withholding small warnings, adjusting direction by degreesrather than declarations, watching how the world responds when I choose not to act on what I see.
Patterns emerge. The imposed visions push toward immediate action, toward interference, toward decisions made without time to question them. The organic ones allow space, unfolding without pressure, existing whether I act or not.
I begin to categorize them as they arrive, marking the difference instinctively, storing each confirmation until it becomes something closer to certainty.
Vaedros notices.
“You’re changing your approach,” he says one evening as we move through a stretch of forest where the light fades earlier than it should, the canopy thick enough to turn the air cool and dim.
“I’m refining it,” I reply, keeping my voice steady, though the words carry more weight than I intend.