POV: Vedran
She had been gone perhaps a quarter of an hour.
The chair across from me had Sylra's pen on it where she had dropped it on her way to the door. She had tried to take it. She had been at the latch when she realized, and she had turned and crossed back and held my eyes for a beat without taking the pen, and I had said go, and she had gone.
I sat at the small table at the window with the eastern reports under my hands and I did not look at the chair.
The wanting in me was steady now in a way it had not been at any other point in the year I had been in her service. That was the strange thing. Now that I had stopped holding the distance, the wanting was not the wild thing I had told myself it would be. It was a low, even pressure under the breastbone — like sitting near a fire I had not been allowed close to for a long time and had finally been given permission to feel. The heat did not consume. The heat only stayed.
I had told her I wanted to be the person who helped Lyra understand the threads. I had said it because it was true and because saying it was the first honest thing I had given her about a future I did not necessarily have. The line stayed in my throat after I said it. It would stay there for the rest of the day.
The door opened.
Ithara came in with her case. She closed the door at her back, set the case at the foot of the pallet I was no longer in, and looked at the table and the chair across from me and put it together inside one breath.
She sat down opposite me without asking. Sleeves up. The back of her hand at my forehead. Her thumb at the inside of my wrist. She read the pulse. She read the temperature. She watched my eyes track her finger when she lifted it.
I watched what she chose to measure first.
She read the wolf-self interface before she read the breath. The compound markers before the heart. The reflex at the inside of the elbow before the strength of the grip in my left hand. She was not measuring me at the order a healer measured an upright patient. She was measuring me at the order a healer measured a patient whose window she was tracking.
I let her go through it. She finished. She closed her case. She did not pick it up.
"You are stable inside the floor the antidote is holding," she said. She spoke at the register she used for patients who did not need to be managed — flat, informational, direct. "The standing, the working — you can do both inside the floor as long as you do not push past it. The reflex in the left hand is slower than yesterday. The interface is at the same reading as the first measurement. The window is still open. We have what we have."
She stood up. I did not let her reach the case strap.
"The actual number, Ithara," I said. My voice was quiet and it was not a request. I had been calculating the gap inside my own body for days and I needed to know whether my calculation agreed with hers or whether I had been lying to myself.
She stopped. She did not pretend. She did not pretend with me because she had always known that pretending would cost her less time than honesty and would still cost her my faith, and she did not want to lose my faith.
She sat back down and gave me the number.
I let it land. I did not let any of it onto my face. The number was inside the range I had already calculated for myself. The agreement of her number with mine was not a comfort. The agreement was a verdict.
"What happens if Caelen and Kael hit a delay?" I asked. I held her eyes because the question had a shape I needed to see her receive. "Even half a day past the revised estimate."
"The window closes before they return," she said. She did not soften it. "There is no margin in the number I just gave you. The route was already compromised. The recalculation Kael is running on the road will cost him time he cannot give back to the road. He will reach the gate after the floor under you collapses. Not a long time after. After."
The word sat in the room between us. After.
"And if the window closes," I said. I said it because I needed the rest of the sentence even though the rest of the sentence was the thing I had been holding at a distance since I had first felt the compound shift inside me.
"The fifth antidote can still be administered," she said. "Efficacy drops significantly. Not a treatment any more. An attempt."
"What is an attempt," I said, "in numbers?"
"I am not going to give you the number for an attempt, Vedran." She held my eyes and her voice was steady and the steadiness was not clinical. It was the steadiness of a woman who had decided where the line was and was not going to cross it for me. "I will give you the number for the open window because you have the right to know. The number is bad."
I could have pressed her. I did not. The mercy in her refusal was in the refusal itself, and I was not going to spend the mercy by walking past it.
"I am asking you not to tell Sylra the specific number on the window," I said. I set each word down carefully because I could hear what the request sounded like in the mouth of a man who had let Kael keep a worse number from her for months. "Not to keep it from her. To let me be the one who tells her. In this room, when I am the one holding her eyes for it."
Ithara did not answer at once. I knew she was inside the choice and not giving me an inch on it.
"This is not the same," I said. "I am not asking you to keep it from her. I am asking to be the one who delivers it. There is a difference."
"There is a difference," Ithara said. She set her hands on her knees and looked at me with a face that had decided to give me one more question before she decided whether to give me what I had asked for. "I am going to ask you the question that lives inside that difference. When are you going to tell her?"
I did not answer.
The number was the number. The wanting under my breastbone went still. The fire I had been allowed close to had a measurable distance to it now and I had been handed the measure.
I did not know when I was going to put it in her hands. I had been a man who answered every question put in front of him for the whole of my professional life, and I did not have an answer for this one.
She watched me not have one. She picked up her case.
"You will tell her, Vedran," she said. She paused at the door and looked back at me — not with anger, not with softness, but with the specific weight of a woman who had just drawn a line and was trusting me not to step over it. "That is what was different about the difference."
She left.