novelraw Chapter 357: How To Keep Them?
Chapter 357: How To Keep Them?
Sera stayed by the Hummer while the heat bled off the hood.
She didn’t move much. She didn’t need to. The yard below kept throwing noise and motion at itself, and the men around her turned that noise into work.
Elias finished a check at the grille and wiped his hands on a clean rag before he touched anything else. That small care always pleased her creature.
Clean hands. Clean tools. Keep what is ours right.
Zubair stood ten paces out with glass and a notepad. He didn’t waste words. He didn’t posture for an audience that wasn’t there.
He put weight where it belonged and the ground near him felt steadier for it. Mild amusement slid through her; he never seemed to change, and it was a quality that she was beginning to appreciate more and more when it came to him.
Afterall, the ground should not change.
Alexei lived in her ear like winter held behind a gate: quiet, precise, present when the hinge moved.
He breathed once through the comm and let silence do most of the work. Somewhere along the west line, he watched men who still thought volume was power and waited to prove the opposite.
Lachlan stayed within reach.
He wasn’t shaking anymore, not where anyone else would notice, but she could feel the fine whine under his skin. His creature, the thing that connected him to her and vice versa, had dug in and didn’t like being told to wait. He watched the yard; he watched her more. That, too, pleased her creature.
He is loud but he is loyal. He wants. He holds. He stays.
She let her arm hang at her side until her knuckles brushed his sleeve.
It wasn’t a cue to act; it wasn’t permission. It was acknowledgment. The hum under his ribs dropped a measure. She could feel him as he drew a full breath and exhaled it like everything was right in the world.
The yard reassembled itself like men laying track they planned to pull up tomorrow.
On the platform, the skull-painted mouthpiece was gone, but his orders were alive and well in the way others checked the empty stage before moving. Cages rattled and went still.
A single, thin two-stroke note faded toward the goat path—courier gone, route kept for later.
Sera watched it all with the easy interest of a woman in a window seat on a train, eyes catching on anything that glittered or shifted.
A man in the yard wore a jacket she liked the cut of. A row of bolt heads on the nearest silo matched the pattern on a tin she once bought for tea. Someone had used red welding rod where blue would have been cleaner.
She filed it all away, not because it mattered, but because the world was a box of tiny treasures again and her creature liked its full pockets.
Candles later. Chocolate later. Blankets later. After we find a place to stop and breathe.
It feels like it had been a very long time since she had drawn a breath and relaxed.
Far too long.
She didn’t love the way Lachlan’s pupils spiked, then fell, then spiked again when the comm opened. He held level because she was close. He would struggle the moment he had to stand apart.
Bring him back if he breaks. Bring him back with touch. Or bite. Either is fine.
’Not yet,’ she her creature, a slight smile on her face. ’They’re busy at the moment.’
Zubair’s pencil paused and restarted.
He never looked back to check where she was; he didn’t need to. Elias slid the clamp home and tested it with a flat, confident twist. Alexei marked breath and position over the wire with a single sentence that landed like a measuring tape across the yard: south mast blind, north blind, west line unstable, movement at fuel.
Sera let her eyes come back to Lachlan for one heartbeat. He pretended not to notice.
He is close to the edge. You are the edge. You need to stop him from falling.
’I know.’
The two words were easy to say, but unfortunately for Sera, she had no idea how to put them into practice.
How do you stop someone from falling when it seems that is all you are doing?
But Sera didn’t speak. She didn’t hint.
She was the salted fish on the plate: there because she chose to be, not because anyone had set her there. The men moved around that simple fact the way water moved around a stone.
Zubair lifted two fingers. Elias answered with a nod. Alexei’s reply was a bare breath on the channel. Lachlan shifted his weight to his toes and then back to his heels, settling into whatever rhythm Zubair wanted.
Sera looked at the cages one more time. The dead closest to the platform wouldn’t look toward the ridge. They felt her without seeing and chose the safer ignorance of steel.
They are proper. They remember where they belong.
’Good. Let them.’
Zubair clicked his tongue once—the sound he used when the plan was about to turn into motion. Sera stayed where she was and let the center hold.
Keep them. Make them prove they deserve to carry you.
It worried Sera when her creature pushed for things that she didn’t know how to do. It made it seem so simple... ’keep them’... but how do you keep a person?
Shaking her head, not liking the thoughts going through her mind, Sera watched Lachlan glance at the mirror on the Hummer, catch her face for half a second, and reset his mouth into something that wanted to be a grin.
Not now.
Later, she would put a blanket over his shoulders and press a square of chocolate to his tongue and remind the creature inside him that patience had a flavor. Later, not now.
Zubair’s shadow crossed her boots. He stopped without crowding.
"We go on his mark," Elias told her, not as a report, just as a shape for the next breath.
Sera tipped her head and kept the world.
The channel opened low. Alexei: "West line: four with a flamer, two rifles. Gate crew looks at their hands too often. Platform eyes distracted. Your window is small and obvious."
"Obvious is fine," Zubair returned. "We keep the silos. We cut the chains. We leave the stage for last."
Sera’s creature purred.
Yes. Keep their pantry. Take their teeth.
She didn’t answer out loud. She didn’t need to.
When Zubair started forward, she let the Hummer’s door bump her hip and stayed behind the line of his work.