Chapter 5: Kadrian

(Partial chapter)

The warning came too late. By the time I phased to the ridge, she was already falling.

The grizzly huffed and lumbered back toward her cubs, indifferent to what she had set in motion — just a mother removing a perceived threat, the most natural thing in the world, with no understanding of what she had nearly ended and no interest in finding out. I watched the woman with the long frost-coloured hair go over the edge — arms reaching for something that wasn't there, expression cracked open with a fear that looked, even in that fraction of a second, unfamiliar on her face. As if her body had encountered the one kind of danger her considerable experience hadn't prepared it for. Then she was gone, and the forest continued as if nothing had happened, because for the forest, nothing had.

I teleported to the edge and looked down.

She lay motionless on a ledge far below, her body at an angle that told the story immediately. Broken leg. Broken arm. I reached out with my senses — the focused extension required to read another's physical state across distance — and found, with a relief that surprised me in its intensity, a light concussion. She was losing blood through her wounds. Her spine was intact. She had landed badly but not fatally.

I phased down beside her. The ledge was barely wide enough for both of us, the ravine wall cold and damp behind me, the river running somewhere below with the indifference of water that has never been asked to care. Her backpack was still strapped to her back — she had held onto it through the fall, through the impact, through all of it. A person who could not afford to lose what she carried.

I scooped her up as carefully as the ledge and the angle permitted. She moaned when I moved her — the unguarded sound of a body reporting serious damage, stripped of any performance — and tears tracked silently down her face. Not sobbing. Just tears, because the body had decided and hadn't consulted anyone. She had been down here alone, and she had stopped trying to hold herself together. There had been no one to hold it together for.

Her eyes opened. Just for a moment — enough to find my face, to register what she was seeing. I was still partially visible, caught between states from moving too quickly, more suggestion than substance. Most people confronted with that image, in pain, half-conscious, would have reacted with terror. She looked at me with something different — confusion, yes, but beneath it an assessment, quick and automatic and almost involuntary. The look of someone whose threat-calibration had been running so long it operated independently of everything else, including a broken femur and a two-storey fall into a ravine.

Then her eyes closed again.

And I went completely still.

Those eyes.