The frustration arrived before Ant had fully decided to let it.
He considered himself reasonably sharp. Every clan history, every bonding mechanic, every Kithren classification he could get his hands on, he'd read it, absorbed it, until he could recite half of it better than people who'd actually grown up inside that world. He wasn't slow. He wasn't naive. Reading a room fast enough to eat that night took a kind of intelligence that never showed up on a formal assessment and mattered a great deal more than one ever could, when the alternative was not eating at all.
And somehow, every single conversation with this woman left him roughly twenty paces behind, watching her arrive at conclusions he hadn't even started considering himself. She named problems before he'd finished identifying them and handed him the answer before he understood the question. It should have felt reassuring, having someone that capable tangled up in whatever was happening to his life. Mostly it just felt like being permanently late to his own decisions.
It was starting to properly irritate him.
"Alright." Sharper than he meant. "Explain it, then. What's so obvious about my next move that I'm apparently the only person in the room who hasn't worked it out?"
Maren didn't answer right away. She'd already crossed to the corner of the room, where a small refrigeration unit sat blackened along one side, its door warped from the heat. The hinges protested loudly as she forced it open, peering inside with genuine uncertainty about what she'd find, the interior light flickering before it steadied.
"Please still be edible," she muttered, half to the fridge, half to herself, sorting through it, treating the crisis as already over and the next priority as food. She pulled out a paper-wrapped sandwich that had survived marginally better than the room around it, held it to the light, unwrapped it.
"Want one?" Already biting into it. She gestured back at the fridge with what remained, not seeming to notice they were standing in the still-smoking wreck of her family's laboratory.
Ant shook his head, arms folded, waiting for an answer to a question he'd asked ten seconds ago and apparently wasn't getting yet.
She swallowed, chewed through the rest of the bite, kept him waiting a few seconds longer than necessary.
"Okay! Okay, come on, let's actually work through this properly." She talked around the next bite, same as she talked around everything. "So. You're not going back to your old clan, right? I'm assuming that, because if you were, you'd have gone there today instead of letting a total stranger put a chip behind your ear. They would be more than capable of doing a chip fitting for you. That's not what someone planning a reconciliation does."
Ant said nothing, which she took as confirmation.
"Right, and joining somebody else's clan isn't the plan either, I don't think. I mean, you could! There are clans that'd take an unaffiliated Kithered adult, especially one as unusual as what you've got. Word of today's going to travel eventually, one way or another, and somebody's going to come looking for you. And you haven't gone looking first. So. That tells me you're not interested in being found."
The accuracy of that landed somewhere uncomfortable. She wasn't wrong. He'd thought about academies, briefly, on the path, and dismissed it just as fast. Institutions asked questions he couldn't afford to answer, and every single one of them would eventually want to know exactly the things he'd spent the whole afternoon trying not to explain to anyone.
"Which leaves basically one option. Unclanned. Traveling, odd jobs, building something out of nothing, the same as anyone else who's shut out of the formal side of things."
"That's not obvious," Ant said. "That's what's left after you eliminate everything else. There's a difference."
"Okay, fine, fine, it's inevitable, then, if you want to be picky about the word." She finished the first half of the sandwich and started the second without seeming to notice the state of the room around them at all. "Either way, it's where you're headed. And that's, that's actually where I come in."
She set the rest of the sandwich down on the least damaged stretch of bench and turned to face him properly, some of the ease dropping out of her posture. Her shoulders squared. This part, clearly, she'd rehearsed, if only in her own head, and only once.
"I have no intention of leaving my clan," she said. "I want that clear from the start, okay? Cerlan is my family, my work, everything I've built my whole life around. I'm not asking to walk away from any of that." She paused, choosing the next part carefully. "But I'm also stuck in this house alone most of the time with nothing to do but theorise, and honestly, it's driving me a little bit insane, reading records, running simulations, building models of how Kithren move through the world off secondhand accounts and archived data, and none of it is real, none of it, because I've never actually had the chance to watch it happen in front of me! Not properly, not like you get to, out there with a bonded creature at your side. Everything I know is theory. Everything you lived through these last few days is real, actually real, and I have spent every minute since you told me about it wanting to see it myself instead of reading some fourth-hand account written by someone who wasn't even there."
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
"Dangerous," Ant started to say, and she cut him off before he got the rest of it out.
"I know. I know it's dangerous, I've thought about that part a lot, actually, longer than I probably should admit. I've been circling this for a while now, if I'm honest, leaving, even just briefly, seeing some of what I've only ever gotten to read about, though I've never actually done it. I've always been too frightened, too unsure I'd survive a week outside the structure I've had my whole life." She held his eyes. "But you clearly have those instincts. That's the first thing that actually interested me about you, before I even saw what your Kithren could do. I watched you turn and face two people twice your size, both trained, both bonded, and pick up a sword you clearly didn't know how to use, before he'd even shown himself. That's not nothing, most people freeze, but you picked up a weapon instead. I don't know if I have that in me, and I've never had a reason to find out."
"And then I saw Mahkir." Her voice actually brightened, unmistakably, and she didn't seem to notice it had. "That's reason two, and it might honestly be the bigger one. I want to see what he actually is, out in the world, not in a lab he just managed to set on fire. And someone who already knows how to keep both of us alive while I work out how to be useful instead of a liability."
Ant went over it again, looking for the crack in it. He thought about the house, the empty formal rooms, the parents who existed mostly as an absence, a young woman with more resources than he'd ever seen in one place and nobody around to actually share any of it with. Lonelier than she was letting on.
He didn't find the crack. That bothered him nearly as much as the reasoning did.
"You've thought about this." Not a question. "This wasn't decided in the last twenty minutes."
"No." No embarrassment in it. "I've been circling the idea longer than I'd like to say out loud. You just happened to be the first genuinely plausible answer that turned up."
"That's not entirely reassuring."
"I wasn't trying to reassure you. I said it because it's true, and you seem to like true better than comforting, from what I've seen of you today."
"Let's say I agree." He kept his voice even, choosing the words before he committed to asking. "What do I actually get out of it, beyond company. You've got money, resources, whatever's left of this lab once it's rebuilt. I've got nothing to offer you that isn't already yours."
"You've got him." She nodded at Mahkir without looking away from Ant. "And whatever you are, which I still don't have a word for. That's not nothing to me. Honestly, that's the most interesting thing that's happened to me in longer than I want to admit, and I'm not going to pretend the interest is purely selfless."
"So it is about what I can give you."
"It's both things at once, I think. I like you enough already that I want this to work, and I like being honest more than I like sounding good, so, yes, the reasons aren't clean." She shrugged, easy about admitting it, nothing in her face suggesting it bothered her. "I don't think most people's reasons are, if you actually look at them."
He couldn't argue with that either, which was becoming an increasingly familiar and increasingly annoying pattern.
He glanced down at Mahkir, settled at the edge of the wreckage, giving the entire negotiation exactly as much attention as he gave anything that wasn't fighting or sleeping, which was to say, none. Whatever verdict Ant reached, it wasn't coming from that direction.
"I need to think about it."
"That's fair." She said it fast, too fast, already reaching for the last of the sandwich, the matter more or less settled in her head regardless.
He caught the gap immediately. "I said think about it. Not that I've decided."
"I know what you said." She wiped her hands on her sleeve, glancing around the ruined room, seeming to properly register for the first time how bad it actually looked. "I also know you haven't said no yet. That usually means something."
"That's presumptuous."
"Maybe." She grinned, not remotely sorry about it. "I'm not wrong very often, though. I'd rather just say that than pretend otherwise."
He didn't have an answer for that either, and the absence of one was, he suspected, exactly the confirmation she'd been hoping for.
He looked past her, at the wreck of the room, at Mahkir dozing through the whole negotiation with total indifference to how it resolved, and let himself actually sit with what she was offering. Not just company. Not just protection from whatever the unclanned path would otherwise have demanded of him. A future, an actual one, with steps in it, direction, something past the next meal or the next place to sleep.
He hadn't planned anything past survival in longer than he could remember. Every decision since the ceremony hall had been reactive, built around getting through the next day rather than shaping any of the ones after. The wasteland had been the one exception, and even that had been narrow: find the artifact, come back, see what happens. He'd never let himself imagine further, because imagining further had always felt like inviting disappointment he couldn't afford.
Now there was a further. Whether he wanted it handed to him by someone he'd known for a matter of hours didn't change the plain fact that for the first time since he was seventeen, someone was asking him what came next instead of just expecting him to survive until it arrived.
He gave her neither the yes nor the no she was waiting for.
"Alright." He looked at her. "Since you seem to have all the answers today, what's our first move?"