Chapter 1201: Safer

The laughter kept coming.

Jesse had heard soldiers laugh louder over split rations and graves dug in frozen ground, because sometimes the body found the wrong way to release what it could no longer hold. Hers came in broken breaths, each one catching against the next while Lucavion’s explanation repeated inside her.

’Safer.’

Jesse lowered her gaze to the pale stone under their boots. Lattice-shadows moved across it with the wind, breaking over the darker edge of Lucavion’s silhouette.

"What is funny?"

There was no irritation in his voice yet. Only uncertainty.

That nearly set her laughing again.

Her laughter thinned instead, losing strength one breath at a time until only a strained smile remained. Jesse dragged the back of her hand under one eye, furious to find moisture there, then stared at the faint wetness across her knuckles as memories began pressing through the absurdity.

A command tent before sunrise.

Three officers asking the same questions in different orders.

When had she last seen him? What had he told her? Where would he run? Had she helped him prepare?

They had searched through what little she owned as though he might have folded himself between her spare clothes. Men who had spoken past her for months suddenly remembered every hour she had spent training under him. Every conversation became suspicious once the person on the other side was gone.

Lucavion had disappeared, but his name had remained, and hers had been written beside it in reports she had never been permitted to read.

Jesse’s smile faded. Her fingers closed around the edge of her sleeve, twisting the cloth until the seam pressed into her palm. She could still remember the silence outside that tent: the soldiers who would not meet her eyes, and the others who watched too closely.

All of that had begun before command decided what else to do with her.

And he thought absence had protected her.

"You really believe that," she said.

Lucavion’s brow drew in slightly. "Believe what?"

"That staying away kept me out of it."

Her voice finally reached him. His posture did not change, but the easy curve at the corner of his mouth flattened.

Jesse looked directly at him.

She could not decide where to begin. With the questions. The searches. The way suspicion had followed her after everyone stopped expecting useful answers.

Her anger chose for her.

"They came for me the morning after you disappeared."

"Who?"

He asked it at once.

Lucavion’s attention sharpened, every trace of uncertainty narrowing toward the practical detail he could seize and examine.

"Command."

"Why?"

The word struck Jesse harder than it should have.

The question was reasonable. He had not been there, and that was the whole problem.

"Why do you think?"

Lucavion said nothing.

"You disappeared. I had spent nearly a year beside you." Jesse counted the facts without meaning to, laying them down as she might have reconstructed a failed operation. "You trained me. Ate with me. Took assignments with me. Half the camp knew it."

Her mouth tightened.

"Then one morning, you were gone."

Recognition began forming in his face, but Jesse had carried the rest too long to stop when he finally started understanding.

Command had pulled her from morning formation before the camp had finished deciding whether Lucavion was missing, dead, or running. They seated her under lamplight already paling against dawn, and the questions moved from his behavior to possible routes, nearby crossings, supply caches, and every name he might have trusted beyond the camp.

"They asked which border you would use."

Lucavion’s eyes narrowed. "I didn’t know."

"I know."

"Jesse—"

"Neither did they."

"So they asked again."

The first questioning lasted until the camp had fully awakened. The second came before midday. Different officers, the same questions reordered, each repetition carrying the assumption that a changed answer would be more truthful than the first.

Jesse had told them everything she knew.

That had been the trouble.

She knew how Lucavion held a sword when he was tired, what food he pushed aside, which wounds made him quiet and which made him unbearable. She knew the difference between his careless smile and the one he wore when he had already decided to do something dangerous.

She had not known he meant to leave.

Command found that harder to believe than betrayal.

"The first time, I told them the truth."

Lucavion watched her. "And?"

"They didn’t believe me."

"Why?"

Jesse stared at him.

"Because it didn’t fit." Her mouth twisted. "Know you well enough to be suspicious, but not well enough to know you were leaving? They couldn’t swallow that."

The line reached him. She saw it in the faint change around his eyes, his focus dropping from her face to the stone between them.

They had searched her possessions next. Everything had been done according to procedure, which only meant each humiliation came with someone recording it. Her correspondence was collected. Her bedding was stripped. The seams of her uniforms were checked while she stood nearby and watched.

Then they questioned the soldiers who slept near her, the ones assigned beside her, anyone who might have heard a conversation she had neglected to report.

For several days, Jesse was removed from duties that placed her near maps, sealed orders, or outgoing patrols. No accusation was read. None was necessary. Soldiers noticed where she was no longer permitted to stand.

The camp changed around her by degrees.

Conversations shortened when she approached. Those who had once asked her to sharpen their technique stopped speaking about future movements within her hearing. Others became strangely friendly, hoping she might reveal what command had failed to extract.

Lucavion listened without interrupting.

When Jesse stopped, he remained silent long enough that she could hear the wind moving through the terrace lattice behind him.

"I didn’t know they would do that."

"No."

He looked at her.

"You didn’t."

There was no triumph in saying it. Jesse had never believed he had left intending to place command at her door. If he had known, perhaps he would have chosen differently.

"That’s what makes this worse."

He frowned, but Jesse held the explanation back. She could see him still measuring the damage against what he had intended.

"How long did they keep questioning you?"

Jesse gave another short laugh. Nothing remained in it now.

"That wasn’t the punishment."

Lucavion went still.

"They couldn’t prove I helped you," she continued.

"Because you didn’t."

"That wasn’t the same thing as trusting me."

Command eventually stopped asking where Lucavion had gone. They had exhausted the questions before they exhausted their suspicion. Jesse returned to duty, but not to the same duty. The assignments given to her became simpler, further removed from planning and from soldiers who had known her long enough to object.

No order named the reason, and no officer needed to.

"They stopped putting me anywhere information mattered," she said. "Then they stopped putting me with people who knew me."

The line of Lucavion’s jaw hardened. "Where did they send you?"

Jesse remembered the order folded on the table. The officer who delivered it had not looked pleased, only relieved that the problem had become someone else’s.

"The Seventeenth Mobile."

Lucavion did not ask what the Seventeenth was. Recognition moved across his face, quick and unwelcome, and a hard, ugly satisfaction flared in Jesse before she could stop it.

"So you do know them."

His eyes lifted to hers. "They sent you to Shale?"

"Eventually."

The word seemed to take the air with it.

For the first time since they had stepped onto the terrace, Lucavion looked as though he had forgotten to arrange his face. His gaze moved over her, searching for injuries that years and clothing no longer allowed him to find.

Jesse hated that gaze almost as much as she had once wanted it.

"How long?" he asked.

Jesse told him.

The telling took a few sentences. His silence afterward took far longer.

She watched his hands, because his face had become too controlled again. His fingers had curled, the nails pressing into his palms before he noticed and loosened them.

Then he looked at her: the Academy uniform, the sword at her side, the fact of her standing upright before him. Relief entered his expression before judgment could stop it.

"But you made it through."

The words were quiet, almost grateful.

Jesse felt her restraint tear loose.

"I made it through?"

Lucavion’s expression closed at once.

She stepped toward him. He did not retreat, but the space between them ran out until she could see herself reflected in the black of his eyes.

"Is that what you’re going to say?"

"That isn’t what I meant."

"Then what did you mean?"

"That you’re standing here."

"I know I’m standing here."

Her voice cracked across the terrace. A bird startled from somewhere under the roofline, wings beating once through the open air before vanishing beyond the wall.

Jesse barely saw it.

"I was there, Lucavion." Her voice dropped. "You don’t need to tell me I survived it."

He opened his mouth, but she was no longer willing to hear relief offered up as another harmless thing.

’Surviving isn’t an answer. It doesn’t bring back the people who weren’t standing beside me, or undo what I had to become because stopping was never offered as an option.’

"You thought I’d be fine."

"I didn’t say that."

"You didn’t have to."

The denial left his face.

Jesse could see the reasoning now. She had lived beneath it for years. Lucavion had known she could fight. He had taught her to. He had watched her endure the camp, her family, the officers who treated her name as something borrowed and revocable.

"You left because staying near me would make things worse."

"Yes."

"You stayed away because you thought that was safer."

Lucavion let that one stand.

The sun had fallen behind the upper roofs, and the terrace had gone colder.

Jesse’s anger sank deeper instead of leaving, finding the place beneath the questioning, the reassignment, even Shale.

"You always thought I could manage."

His expression shifted. He almost received the words as kindness, for half a breath.

Jesse saw the moment he realized they were not.

"I used to like that about you."

His eyes held hers.

Jesse had imagined finding him through every year he was absent. She had imagined anger, relief, fists against his chest, his hand closing around hers. Never this. Never having to explain that surviving what followed him did not mean she had escaped it.

Her fingers tightened at her sides.

"I didn’t know you’d use it as an excuse to leave me alone."