Ant looked at Mahkir for a long time before he said anything.
None of the obvious names worked once he said them out loud. He started with colour, because colour was the first thing anyone noticed.
"Crimson," he said, testing it out loud. "Crimson Something." Mahkir gave nothing back, no twitch, no opinion, tail curling in its usual slow rhythm. "No, that's far too obvious."
He tried it quieter, mostly to himself, though not quiet enough: Maren was still at the console a few feet off, close enough to catch every failed attempt. "Ember Fox. No, he's not a fox. Ember Cat."
Nothing landed. He kept trying anyway, one option at a time. Fire was the one part of this he actually understood: the low glow that never quite left Mahkir's fur, the breath that had put a hole through most of a wall less than an hour ago.
"Blaze," he said, then didn't like the sound of it. "Blazeclaw. Blazing." He stopped, then started again. "Emberfang," he tried, saying that one twice. "No, that sounds like something that loses in the first round."
He tried Cinderclaw. He tried Scarletmaw, which sounded promising right up until he said it, then just sounded ridiculous. He tried Redwick for no reason he could explain even to himself and abandoned it halfway through saying it. He even tried Sootclaw, out of desperation more than conviction, and Mahkir's ears flattened just enough to make his opinion clear.
"Red Fluffy Kit."
The sound from Maren's direction was not subtle.
"Oh," she said, straightening off the console, laughter breaking through despite whatever effort she'd made to hold it back. "I can see the fear now. Your opponent has a level-three Red Fluffy Kit." She pressed a hand over her mouth, entirely failing to keep it in. "That's terrifying, honestly. Whole armies will flee."
Ant scowled at her, which only made it worse, and turned back to Mahkir rather than dignify it.
He actually looked this time, setting the easy words aside to consider the animal in front of him properly. Small and cat-sized, or he had been.
He stopped and looked again, measuring against memory instead of habit this time. Mahkir had grown, not by much, but the legs were longer than they'd been in the cave, the shoulders broader, and Ant could no longer picture him small enough to fit inside a coat pocket. Two inches, maybe three, in less than a week.
"Does he grow every time he levels?" Ant asked, before he'd fully decided to ask it out loud. "This isn't the first time. Twice before, after we have had some fights and he levelled up, I've asked him if he'd gotten bigger. The first time he just said smaller, like that answered it. The second time all he said was that it was obvious, that he lived in that body. I never pushed either time. I'm not sure why."
Maren looked up from the console, glanced at Mahkir, and set her stylus down without seeming to notice she'd done it. "It's not supposed to, no. Not like this." She was already crossing toward him, crouching to bring herself level with Mahkir, careful not to touch. "A Common-grade creature might put on some size over months of training. Maybe a year of it, and nothing you'd catch without measuring, and never in a single jump right after a level up." She looked up at Ant, then back down at Mahkir, studying him now with the same focus she'd given the console readouts an hour ago. "How long ago did you say he hatched?"
"Six days, maybe seven."
"And you've asked him twice already, and never told me." She said it slowly, testing the words before she let them out. "That's not normal, Ant. I don't have an explanation for it, and I don't like not having one."
Ant went over what he knew once more. Red fur with sharp amber eyes, unusual growth spurts that didn't make any sense. He could defeat Kithren at much higher levels, and he was graceful in attack. It almost reminded him of...
Lynx. He hadn't expected it to feel so familiar, catching him off guard. He said it out loud this time.
"Lynx."
Maren looked up from the console. "You said that different than the others."
"I was just thinking of how he attacks, how he moves. It reminded me of something." He didn't look away from Mahkir. "There's a variant. Shadow Lynx. Not the rarest type there is, but prized for stealth over raw strength. I had a cousin who bonded one, back while I was still part of my clan, while I was preparing for my own bonding ceremony. I stood at the edge of the hall watching him get it and figured my turn would come eventually. That I'd get one too."
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"And?"
"And nothing came." He said it without dressing it up, no invitation to make anything of it. "Nothing ever came for me at my own ceremony either. Whatever name I'd have given it stayed just that, a name with nothing behind it."
Maren didn't say anything to that, which he was grateful for. She just looked at Mahkir a moment longer, then back at him, and said nothing else.
Mahkir didn't look much like a lynx, if Ant was honest. He didn't match anything Ant had catalogued in years of reading everything he could get his hands on. But it held together closer than anything else he'd tried tonight.
"Flaming Lynx," he said, slowly.
Mahkir looked at him, tail curling once. No objection, which, from a creature who'd made his feelings about Flame Breath perfectly clear the first time he'd had one, counted as approval.
Maren, at least, had stopped laughing.
"Flaming Lynx." She tried the sound of it against whatever standard she judged these things by, glancing at Mahkir again, properly considering him now. "That works. It's evocative without being ridiculous, and it actually references the visual profile. Better than Red Fluffy Kit. Though I was kind of hoping you'd go with that one. For the official record."
"Thank you for that input."
He said the name again out loud. A colder thought came right after it, one that had nothing to do with naming at all.
She could see his stats.
She'd read the numbers straight off the screen a few minutes ago, spoken them out loud without hesitation, and he'd been too caught up in the moment to register what that meant. Stats weren't supposed to be visible outside the bonded pair. That was the entire foundation the reader lenses ran on, the reason people trusted the system with numbers they'd never say out loud to a stranger. The reason he'd spent so long telling himself that whatever else the world had taken from him, the numbers, when he finally had some, would at least be his.
They weren't, not entirely.
He thought back through the afternoon and didn't like what he found. Every figure she'd read off, every scan, the ease she'd moved between his data and Mahkir's, no boundary between them at all, not one she seemed to know was supposed to be there. How much had she already seen that he'd never agreed to show her?
"How could you see his stats." He cut across whatever she'd been about to say. "Before the calibration, you had an idea. After it, you could quote them exactly. Was that just because you were setting them, or can labs always see this?"
Her mouth twitched, and for a second it looked like she might apologise. She didn't. "Cerlan built the chip system. We keep override access. Sensors built into equipment like this, for calibration, diagnostics. It's not available outside the clan, and even inside it, using this in the field is forbidden. This is lab equipment. It's not something I could carry around and point at strangers on the street."
That was meant to be reassuring, and it wasn't, quite. Somewhere in a Cerlan facility he'd never see, there existed the means to read a stranger's private numbers off a screen.
"Has this gone anywhere," Ant asked, "outside this room?"
"No." She didn't hesitate on that one. "The console keeps a log, every scan and every read timestamped, and I haven't sent anything anywhere. I wouldn't, not without asking you first."
"Wouldn't, or can't."
"Wouldn't." She met that one head-on, no flinching. "There's a difference, and I'd rather you believe the right one."
"I don't know you well enough to believe either."
"That's fair, I guess." She said it too fast, like she'd braced for something harsher. "I mean, ask me again in a week. Ask me again in a month, if you want. I'll probably say the same thing, but you don't have to just take my word for it now."
There was nothing to be done about it now. The alternative, no chip at all and invisible in every way that mattered, was worse by any measure he could think of. The foam smell was still working on him too, sweet and chemical.
Maren turned back to the console, fingers already moving, entering the classification with the same quick efficiency she brought to everything.
"There," she said. "Done."
She turned the screen toward him.
KITHREN: FLAMING LYNX
He read it, then thought of his own screen, the one that had been running unprompted since the cave, older than anything her equipment could touch. He already knew what it said: Kithren, Mahkir.
The two didn't match.
Maybe Mahkir wasn't a species at all. Maybe it was just his name, personal and individual, and Flaming Lynx was the closest the world's machinery could get to whatever he actually was. Two systems, two kinds of truth, and no way to know which one, if either, was complete.
My name is Mahkir, he said. As to what I am, I am your partner, and that's all either of us needs to know right now.
He'd spent twenty minutes agonising over a name for his breed. It was entirely possible none of it mattered. The official record would carry a different one forever, chosen almost as an afterthought once the real answer had already been settled by whoever had named Mahkir long before Ant ever found him.
There was nothing to change now. The classification was already sitting in Cerlan's records, and he'd probably never see that entry again to fix it.
He waited a moment longer, then made himself ask the question he'd been avoiding since the lab first went quiet.
"Alright," he said, looking at her. "What's the favour."
Maren didn't hesitate.
"I want to go with you."
The words came too fast. She'd clearly had them ready, just waiting for him to ask.
Ant blinked. Whatever he'd braced for, money, some formal arrangement, a debt he couldn't easily refuse, this wasn't it. He replayed the sentence, checking it against what he thought he'd heard, and none of it made sense on the first pass.
"Go with me? Go with me where?"
"I haven't even decided what comes after tonight," he added, when she didn't answer right away. No plan, no destination past whatever came after walking out of this house. The wasteland was behind him, the artifact still unfound. His old clan remained exactly as closed to him as it had always been.
"It's obvious, isn't it?"
Her voice hadn't asked for agreement. It stated a fact, the same certainty she'd used reading off his stats a few minutes earlier.
Ant looked at her, then at Mahkir, who watched the whole exchange with nothing but mild, unhelpful interest.
Whatever she'd already decided, he was going to need a great deal more than obvious before any of this made sense to him at all.