# PSYCHIC HARVEST

### Chapter 3: What Sticks

**PART TWO**

The tree line thirty yards out hadn't moved. That was the problem.

"Talk to me," Reyes said quietly, one hand already resting on the hilt at her hip, eyes scanning without settling anywhere.

"I don't know yet." Ethan crouched, keeping Mura close, feeling the small creature's attention pull hard toward a single point in the brush — not fear, he realized, not exactly. Something closer to recognition. "Mura's not scared. He's—" Ethan searched for the word and found, to his own surprise, that he actually had one. "He's curious. Whatever it is, it's not hunting us. Not yet."

"That's not nothing," Talbo muttered, already backing toward the shelter's supply cache, "but it's not comforting either."

The brush shifted, and a shape stepped clear of it with unhurried, deliberate calm — low and long-bodied, plated in bramble and bone, easily recognizable now from Ethan's own notes.

"Thistlebound," Ethan said. "Alone, though. They're pack hunters."

"Not always," Reyes said, voice tightening. "Sometimes a lone one's been pushed out. Old, sick, or—" She didn't finish the sentence, but Ethan filled it in himself a half-second later, cold understanding settling into his stomach.

*Or something worse got the rest of its pack, and it's the only one that ran fast enough.*

The Thistlebound didn't charge. It simply stood at the tree line, watching them with the same patient, deliberate stillness the Hollowmaw had shown him weeks ago in a very different clearing — and Ethan understood, with a clarity that had nothing to do with training and everything to do with two weeks of careful cataloguing, exactly what it was doing.

*It's not deciding whether to attack,* he thought. *It's deciding whether we're worth the risk. It's afraid.*

"It's alone and it's scared," Ethan said aloud, surprising himself with how steady his own voice came out. "It's not going to engage a group this size unless it's desperate. We back toward the shelter slow, we don't run, and we let it decide leaving is the smarter option."

Reyes's eyes flicked to him — evaluating, the way Okoro had evaluated him on day one, the way everyone here seemed to size up a fresh drop before deciding whether he was going to be useful or a liability.

"You sure about that?"

"No," Ethan admitted. "But I've been wrong about being hunted before, and this doesn't feel the same. This feels like something that's already lost."

For a long, suspended moment, nobody moved. Mura's attention stayed locked on the Thistlebound, unblinking, and Ethan felt something pass between the two creatures that he couldn't translate into language — not challenge, not fear. Something closer to a wordless, mutual acknowledgment of two things that had both, recently, learned what it meant to almost not survive.

Then the Thistlebound turned, unhurried, and melted back into the tree line the way it had come.

Nobody spoke for several seconds after it was gone.

"Huh," Talbo finally said, from the doorway of the shelter, sounding almost offended that the excitement was over so quickly.

Reyes let out a slow breath and looked at Ethan with something new in her expression — not quite surprise, closer to a recalculation. "Okoro was right," she said. "You do study this place instead of just surviving it." A pause. "That could get you killed someday too, you know. Reading a threat wrong instead of just running."

"Probably," Ethan agreed. "But running wrong gets you killed just as fast, and at least this way I understand what almost happened afterward."

Reyes huffed something that might have been a laugh, might have been reluctant approval, and clapped him once on the shoulder hard enough to make Mura squeak in protest.

"Come on," she said. "Let's get the rest of this loaded before something less polite decides to test that theory of yours."

---

They made it back to the settlement gates a little after dusk, tired and dust-streaked, Mura finally, mercifully asleep in the crook of Ethan's arm despite every earlier objection to being carried.

Sato was waiting just inside the gate — not unusual, Ethan was learning, since Sato seemed to make a habit of knowing exactly when his people were due back, whether or not anyone told him.

"A quiet run, I hope," Sato said, though something in his tone suggested he already knew it hadn't been entirely quiet.

"Define quiet," Reyes said, and gave him the short version while Ethan listened, still turning the whole encounter over in his notebook-shaped mind — the Thistlebound's fear, its restraint, the strange wordless recognition that had passed between it and Mura.

Sato listened without interrupting, and when Reyes finished, his eyes settled on Ethan with an expression that was harder to read than usual — something between pride and a kind of careful, private calculation.

"You read it correctly," Sato said. "That is rarer than people think. Most survivors your age either run from everything or fight everything. You are already doing neither."

"I got lucky."

"Perhaps." Sato's gaze didn't waver. "Or perhaps you are exactly what I hoped for when I decided to let you carry a Tether after only thirty days instead of sixty." He glanced toward the settlement's central hall, lantern light spilling gold across the dirt street. "There will be a place for you in Haven's patrols, when you're ready. Reyes speaks well of you. Okoro speaks well of you. That is not something either of them does easily."

Something in Ethan's chest — the same something that had loosened earlier, in the workshop, arguing about a name — pulled tight again, for an entirely different reason.

He thought about the question that had been sitting under everything since the moment the world had torn open beneath his feet, the question no amount of training or patrols or careful cataloguing had actually gotten him closer to answering.

*Is there a way back. Is there anyone even looking for one. Or is this just what my life is now, and everyone who's stopped asking simply decided the question wasn't worth carrying anymore.*

"I appreciate that," Ethan said carefully. "I do. But I'm not sure patrols are what I'm looking for."

Sato's expression didn't change, exactly, but something behind his eyes sharpened with interest.

"Then what are you looking for?"

Ethan looked down at Mura, asleep and warm and utterly unbothered by the weight of the question, and thought about a Thistlebound standing alone at a tree line, having already lost everything it used to belong to.

"Answers," Ethan said. "About getting home. Or at least about whether that's even something worth hoping for." He met Sato's eyes. "I don't think I can find those walking a fixed patrol route."

For a long moment, Sato said nothing at all.

Then, slowly, he nodded — not agreement exactly, but something quieter. Recognition, maybe. The same wordless kind Ethan had felt pass between Mura and the Thistlebound an hour before.

"No," Sato said finally. "I don't imagine you can."

Behind him, the settlement's evening bell began to ring, calling in the last of the day's patrols, and Ethan Cole stood at the gate with a sleeping creature in his arms and a question in his chest that he was only just beginning to understand he'd have to go looking for the answer to himself.

---

*End of Chapter 3*