Meera woke to the smell of smoke and something cooking.
For one disoriented heartbeat, she thought she was back in Red Hollow, that her father would lean over her bedroll with his familiar half-smile and remind her that dawn hunting parties left in twenty minutes, with or without her.
Then reality crashed back. Her father was dead. Red Hollow was gone. And she was lying in a cave full of beastmen who'd given her one week to prove she wasn't a liability.
She opened her eyes.
The cave was brighter than she remembered from last night—daylight filtering through the entrance, illuminating details she'd been too exhausted to notice. The walls were rough stone, but someone had carved niches for supplies, had built up the fire pit with carefully placed rocks, had even scratched marks near the entrance that might have been a crude calendar or watch schedule.
This wasn't just a shelter. It was a home. Barely, provisionally, but still.
A shadow fell across her face.
Meera looked up into eyes as silver-gray as polished stone. Renna—the stocky, stone-skinned one—stood over her, holding a wooden bowl.
"You slept fourteen hours," Renna said. No preamble. No inflection. Just fact. "Your body needed it. Now you eat."
Meera sat up, her body protesting every movement. Muscles she'd forgotten existed announced themselves through pain. But she was alive, and she was hungry, and Renna was offering food.
The bowl contained root vegetables boiled with what looked like lizard meat, the whole thing swimming in a thin broth. It wasn't appetizing by any civilized standard, but Meera's stomach didn't care about civilization.
"Thank you," she said, taking the bowl.
Renna's expression didn't change. "Don't thank. Earn."
And then she walked away, leaving Meera to eat alone near the dead fire pit.
The food was bland, undersalted, but Meera ate mechanically, watching the cave's rhythms. Most of the outcasts were already active—Kael stood at the entrance, looking out over the Marches with the intensity of someone expecting enemies at any moment. Zira was doing something with what looked like snares and thin cord. The younger Shadowpaw male was sharpening a knife on a whetstone, the rhythmic scrape almost meditative.
And Sivan was watching her.
Not staring. Not hostile. Just... observing, with those vertical-slit pupils that seemed to catalog everything.
Meera met their gaze. "Is there something on my face?"
"Yes." Sivan's voice held amusement. "Suspicion. Fear. Determination. Exhaustion. Should I continue?"
"I meant literally."
"I know what you meant." They moved closer with that liquid grace, settling beside her without asking permission. "I'm trying to understand you."
"Why?"
"Because Kael gave you a week. That means for seven days, you're one of us. And I prefer to know who I'm eating with."
Meera spooned more stew. "What do you want to know?"
"Why you ran toward us instead of away."
It was the second time someone had asked that. Did it really matter? They'd already let her stay—provisionally, grudgingly, but still.
Then again, maybe it mattered to them precisely because they didn't understand it.
"I was taught," Meera said slowly, choosing words carefully, "that beastmen are dangerous, unpredictable, other. That you can't trust them, can't build anything lasting with them."
"And yet your father led a mixed clan."
Meera's hand tightened on the bowl. "How did you—?"
"You mentioned it yesterday. When you were negotiating for your life." Sivan's tongue flicked out, tasting the air. "But also, you smell like someone who grew up between two worlds. Not quite human, not quite beastman. Caught in the middle."
"That's... accurate."
"So. Your father taught you one thing. The world taught you another. Which did you believe when you ran into our cave?"
Meera thought about that. Really thought. "Neither. I knew you might kill me. But I also knew Dren and his hunters definitely would—and worse. So I chose the uncertainty over the certainty."
"Pragmatic."
"Desperate."
"Often the same thing." Sivan shifted, their scales catching the dim light. "Your father—what happened to him?"
The question should have hurt more. Maybe it would, later, when she had energy for grief. Right now, it just felt hollow.
"He was murdered. By a man who wanted control of Red Hollow. Kiran—" her voice caught on the name, "—my betrothed, gave my father's location to the killers in exchange for safe passage out."
Sivan was quiet for a long moment. When they spoke, their voice was softer. "Betrayal. The kind that rewrites your past as well as your future."
"Yes."
"I know that taste." They didn't elaborate, and Meera didn't ask. Some wounds needed permission to be examined.
Instead, she asked, "Why are you here? Not why did you let me stay—why are you here, in this cave, outcast?"
Sivan's expression went carefully neutral. "I saw something I shouldn't have. Warned people who didn't want to listen. When disaster came, they blamed the seer instead of themselves." Their smile was sharp enough to cut. "Classic tragedy."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. I learned something valuable: truth-tellers are punished,but liars are rewarded. I won't make that mistake again."
The bitterness in their voice was familiar. Meera had tasted it herself every time she thought about Kiran's soft lies.
Movement at the cave entrance drew her attention. Kael had turned, was looking directly at her. Even across the space, his amber eyes seemed to pin her in place.
"You're awake," he called. Not a question. An observation.
"Yes."
"Can you walk?"
Every part of her body screamed no. "Yes."
His mouth twitched—not quite a smile, but close. "Liar. But we'll see. Come here."
Meera stood, her legs wobbling like a newborn foal's. She crossed the cave slowly, aware of everyone watching. This felt like a test. Everything felt like a test.
Kael waited until she reached him before speaking. "You said you can work. Prove it."
"What do you need?"
He gestured to the landscape beyond the cave. The Scorched Marches spread vast and hostile, the morning sun already turning the air shimmering-hot despite the altitude. "See that dead tree? Three hundred paces west?"
Meera squinted. Yes—barely visible, a twisted skeleton of thornwood.
"I see it."
"Deadwood burns hotter than dung, lasts longer. We need fuel for the fire. You go get enough to fill two arms. You make three trips. You drop nothing, you complain of nothing, you stop for nothing. You return by midday or we assume you're dead and eat your portion tonight. Understand?"
It was brutal. Deliberately so. Meera's body was already screaming from three days of running and fourteen hours of collapsed sleep. Three trips of heavy wood in rising heat would push her to the edge.
But this was the week. This was earning her place.
"I understand," she said.
"Sivan. Go with her. Make sure she doesn't die stupidly."
Sivan rose with that liquid grace. "I can't promise miracles."
"Just keep her alive until midday. After that, if she collapses, it's her problem."
Meera walked out of the cave and into the heat.
The Marches in daylight were beautiful in a way that made Meera's chest ache. The sky was impossibly blue, the kind of blue she'd only seen in certain stones her mother used to collect. The mountains rose sharp and white-capped against that blue, defying all logic by holding snow in this heat.
And the heat itself was a living thing—pressing down, wrapping around, stealing breath and thought with equal efficiency.
Meera walked.
Sivan moved beside her with barely any sound, their footsteps whisper-light on stone and sand. They didn't speak. Didn't offer encouragement or warning. Just presence.
Why do I feel safer with them here?
The thought arrived unbidden. Sivan was Serpent's Kin—venomous, predatory, other. But their proximity felt like a shield against the vast indifference of the Marches.
"You're overthinking," Sivan said without looking at her.
"How do you know?"
"I can taste your anxiety. It's quite sour."
"You can taste emotions?"
"Scent carries more information than you realize. Fear smells different than anger. Grief different than despair." They glanced at her with those unsettling eyes. "You smell like all four, constantly shifting."
That should have been invasive, disturbing. Instead, Meera found it oddly comforting. "What do I smell like right now?"
"Determination. And pain. Roughly equal parts."
"Accurate."
They reached the dead tree. Up close, it was larger than it had seemed—thornwood, ancient and hard as iron, split by lightning at some point and left to bleach white under the merciless sun. The branches would be difficult to break, harder to carry.
Meera grabbed the thinnest branch she could find and pulled.
It didn't budge.
She pulled harder, bracing her feet, using her full weight. The branch creaked, shifted fractionally, then—crack—broke free, sending Meera stumbling backward.
Sivan caught her before she fell. Their hands were cool, scaled, surprisingly gentle.
"Leverage," they said. "Not strength. You don't have strength to waste."
They showed her how to wedge the branch against a rock, how to use her body weight as a fulcrum, how to let physics do the work her exhausted muscles couldn't.
Twenty minutes later, Meera had an armful of deadwood.
The walk back felt twice as long as the walk out. The sun climbed higher. The wood bit into her forearms, the thorns finding every soft spot. Her vision swam at the edges.
Don't drop it. Don't stop. Don't fail on the first task.
When the cave entrance finally came into view, Meera's legs were shaking so badly she wasn't sure they'd carry her the last hundred paces.
"Breathe," Sivan murmured beside her. "Fourteen more steps. You can manage fourteen."
Meera counted them. Fourteen. Thirteen. Twelve.
She stumbled into the cave and dumped the wood beside the fire pit.
Kael looked at the pile. Looked at her. Said nothing.
Meera turned around and walked back out for the second load.
By the third trip, Meera was moving on pure will. Her body had transcended pain—everything hurt so uniformly that it became a kind of numbness. The world narrowed to the rhythm: walk, breathe, walk, breathe, don't fall, don't stop, don't think.
Sivan stayed with her for every step, silent and watchful.
When she finally dropped the third armload beside the fire, the sun was directly overhead. Midday. She'd made it.
Meera's legs gave out. She collapsed beside the wood pile, her vision graying at the edges, her lungs burning, her arms screaming.
Kael's shadow fell across her.
"Three loads. On time. Not bad, human."
It might have been the highest praise he was capable of.
Meera looked up at him through sweat-stung eyes. He was still haloed by sunlight from the entrance, his amber eyes catching the light like flames. That scent hit her again—smoke and wild earth and something else she couldn't name.
Safe.
Which was absurd. He was a beastman, a stranger, someone who'd kill her without hesitation if she became a liability.
But her body didn't care about logic. Her body remembered his voice in the darkness saying you stay behind us. Remembered him standing between her and the hunters. Remembered amber eyes asking if she had stones.
"Water," Kael said, and Renna appeared with a skin.
Meera drank. Slowly, like Sivan had taught her.
"You rest one hour," Kael continued. "Then you help Zira with snare repair. Then you help Renna with meal prep. Then, if you're still standing, you take first watch at sunset."
A full day's work. More than that—a rotation slot. The kind of responsibility you gave to people who weren't leaving.
"I thought I only had to survive the week," Meera managed.
Kael's mouth curved fractionally. Almost a smile. "You have to survive today. Tomorrow has its own requirements."
He walked away before she could respond.
Sivan settled beside her. "He likes you."
Meera stared. "That was him liking me?"
"That was him trusting you not to die immediately. For Kael, they're the same thing." They paused. "Also, he keeps looking at you when you don't notice."
"You're imagining things."
"I don't imagine. I observe." Sivan's smile was knowing. "And I taste the way his scent changes when he's near you. Interested. Conflicted. Hungry."
Heat flooded Meera's face that had nothing to do with the sun. "He's just assessing if I'm a threat."
"If you say so."
But as Meera rested against the cool cave wall, she became aware of something she'd been unconsciously tracking: where Kael was in the space. Not looking at him, but always knowing. His position by the entrance. His voice when he spoke to the others. The particular rhythm of his breathing.
Her body cataloging information her mind hadn't requested.
What's happening to me?
Sivan's voice drifted into her awareness like smoke. "The body knows things before the mind admits them. It's both blessing and curse."
Meera didn't ask what they meant.
She already knew.
To be continued...