Yara changed the night Soren came back from the coffee cart, and she changed in the direction of ready.
He noticed it because he was looking now.
She didn’t cling. That was the first thing off.
A year of Yara was a year of weight against his side, a face in his neck, the specific gravity of a creature who wanted to be as close as physics allowed. That Yara wanted proximity.
This one wanted position.
She stood at the window when he came in. Not draped on the bed. Standing, red eyes on the east yard, hands folded. Not a woman waiting for him. A general reading a field.
"You’re up," Soren said.
"I’m up."
"You’re never up first."
"I’m early," Yara said, which was the sentence from the evaluation, the one she’d been repeating for weeks, and now he heard the second half she never said. Early for what.
◆◆◆◆
She stopped sleeping under the bed.
The wolf-shape had lived under his bed since night one, curled in the dark, the safest arrangement they’d worked out for a creature who burned through him faster the more human she got. Wolf under the bed, low erosion, everyone survives the night.
The shape stopped appearing.
Yara stayed humanoid now, in the corner, upright, awake. He ran the cost on it. The number didn’t spike where it should have.
"Your form’s burning me slower," he said, on the third night. "It shouldn’t. Humanoid you costs more. It’s cost more for a year."
"I know."
"So what changed."
"The ceiling." Red eyes on him, patient. "You went to B. Your soul got a bigger room to burn in. I don’t have to be careful. Not anymore." She tilted her head. "I’ve been careful for a very long time, master. It’s strange, not having to be."
◆◆◆◆
She started ordering shadows.
That was the thing that moved it from strange to hard data. He came into the room and the dark in the corners was arranged, moved, set into positions along the walls that had been empty that morning, and Yara was directing them with small motions of one hand, unhurried, a housekeeper setting rooms before guests arrive.
"What are you doing?"
"Housekeeping."
"With the shadows."
"They get lazy if I don’t walk them." She set one along the doorframe, precise. "I like the room defensible. Old habit."
"You’ve never done this."
"I’ve never needed the room defensible." She looked at him, and there was something under the red that he’d been cataloguing all week and finally had a word for. Not the bracing of a creature that expects to be hurt. The bracing of one about to move. A thing getting the ground ready. "I need it defensible now."
"Against what."
"Ask me in a few days."
◆◆◆◆
The pack noticed, in their own registers.
"Yara’s weird," Maren said, meaning it as a technical assessment.
"Yara’s always weird."
"Weird-er. She reorganized my heat corner. For airflow." Maren’s ears flicked. "She said, and I’m quoting, ’you’ll want the exits clear.’ Clear for what? We live here."
Selah put it more precisely, because Selah put everything more precisely.
"She’s not agitated," Selah said. "That’s what’s wrong. If something were coming, she’d be agitated, she’d cling harder, she’d want you closer. She’s doing the opposite. She’s making space."
A frost fern grew and held on the ledge.
"She’s not bracing for something to happen to you. She’s bracing for something she’s about to do."
"You should ask her," Dani said, later, when it was just the two of them and the seal feeds.
"Ask her what?"
"Whatever it is you’ve been not asking her for a week."
Dani didn’t look up from the terminal.
"You’ve got a question sitting on your face. It’s been there since the coffee cart. It’s affecting your sleep, which is affecting your reaction time, which I can see in the training logs."
"You read my reaction time."
"I read everyone’s. Yours dropped four percent. That’s a question you’re carrying." She typed. "Carry it or ask it. The middle’s costing you percent."
"And if the answer’s bad."
"Then it’s bad, and you know, and your reaction time comes back." Dani finally looked at him. "Not knowing is the expensive part, Soren. You taught me that. Sitting on a routing request costs more than sending it."
He looked at her a second longer than the sentence needed.
She’d chosen an odd example. He filed that too, in the column with her name on it, and let it sit.
"You’re right," he said.
"I log everything. Occasionally that includes being right."
◆◆◆◆
It came on the fifth night, and it came through the system, which made it worse.
He was half asleep. Maren was a stove against his back, Mona a warm weight on his chest, Selah’s cold a comfortable line down his left. Yara was in the corner, awake, as she was every night now.
The DING woke him fully, because it was wrong.
[— The one who brought you requests an audience. —]
No brackets in the usual shape. No stat, no advisory, no rank flag. Just a line, in a register the system had never used, and the system itself felt reluctant, a messenger handed news above their pay grade.
He read it twice.
The one who brought you.
Not summoned. Not bonded. Brought. The door word. The anchor word. Troy’s word, three days old, arriving now in a notification the system didn’t have a template for.
Soren lay very still under the pile and did not look at the corner.
"Yara," he said, to the ceiling.
"Yes, master." Her voice, from the dark, awake, steady. Ready.
"The system just sent me something it doesn’t have a format for."
"I know."
"You know."
"I’ve been waiting for you to be strong enough to receive it." A soft sound, cloth, her standing up out of the corner. "That’s what the early was for. I couldn’t do this while you were F-rank. It would have killed you to hear it. You’d have burned out just from the shape of the truth."
The pile slept on around him, warm, oblivious.
"Where," Soren said.
"The east yard. Midnight. Over the seal." Yara’s voice moved toward the door, and paused there. "Come alone. Not because it’s a secret. Because the others can’t stand where you’re going to be standing. Only you were ever built to."
The door didn’t open. She didn’t use doors.
The corner just went empty.
Soren lay under his sleeping pack with a mole on his chest and a notification glowing in a font the system had never worn, and he understood that the thing he’d been declining to check twice for a week was about to check itself.
He didn’t wake anyone.
He’d chosen this pack twice, with full information, and he was about to find out he’d never had full information at all, and some cold pragmatic part of him, the part that had kept him alive across two lives, noted that he wasn’t afraid.
He was curious.
He’d always been most dangerous when he was curious.