# PSYCHIC HARVEST

### Chapter 7: Through the Right Channels

Ethan didn't sleep well that night, though it wasn't the old fear keeping him awake this time — not the ring of eyes in a jungle clearing, not the particular silence of something deciding whether he was worth the risk. It was something quieter and more corrosive: the slow, unwelcome work of recalculating who, exactly, he was allowed to trust inside walls he'd started to think of as safe.

Mura noticed. Of course Mura noticed — three months of bond meant the small creature had gotten uncomfortably good at reading him, curling tight against his side with a low, wordless hum of concern that Ethan felt more than heard.

*I'm fine,* Ethan thought toward him, and felt Mura's skepticism land back just as clearly. *Okay. Not fine. Thinking too much.*

*Always thinking too much,* Mura's presence seemed to answer, something almost fond underneath the concern, and Ethan let out a short, surprised laugh into the dark of the bunkhouse — the first genuinely light thing he'd felt since Vera's voice on the road, warm and terrible, telling him exactly what he wanted to hear.

He didn't see Sato the next day. Or the day after.

He heard, secondhand, filtered through Reyes over a meal three days later, that Okoro's report had reached him, that Sato had gone quiet and thoughtful in the particular way he did when something genuinely worried him, that a handful of trusted officers were quietly, carefully looking into Haven's information flow without making it look like anyone was looking into anything at all.

"That's it?" Ethan asked, turning his mug of watered-down settlement coffee slowly between his hands. "That's the whole response?"

"That's the response you get to see." Reyes's voice wasn't unkind, but there was something firm underneath it, the voice of someone who'd learned this particular lesson herself once and hadn't loved learning it either. "You want Sato showing up at the gate every time something dangerous happens to you personally? He'd never run this place. He'd never finish the research that actually matters for all of us." She held his gaze steadily. "You chose the road that keeps you outside his direct reach, Ethan. That was the right choice for what you're after. It comes with a cost, same as every choice does. This is the cost."

Ethan sat with that longer than he expected to.

It wasn't wrong. He knew it wasn't wrong — he'd made the choice with his eyes open, had told Sato himself, standing at the gate three weeks ago, that he wasn't looking for a fixed patrol route or a chain of command that would slow him down. He'd wanted freedom. He'd gotten it.

He just hadn't quite priced in what freedom cost when something like Vera and Cole was circling closer than he'd realized.

"I'm not asking him to fix it for me," Ethan said finally. "I just don't like not knowing whether the people around me can be trusted."

"Welcome to everyone's actual life," Reyes said, not unsympathetically. "Trust isn't something this place hands you for free just because you made it through the gate once. You build it slow, with specific people, the same way you're building it with me right now by telling me the truth about how worried you actually are instead of pretending you're fine." A small, almost private smile. "You're better at that than you think. Most people your age still perform 'fine' right up until it breaks something."

Ethan huffed something that wasn't quite a laugh, and felt Mura shift against his shoulder, ears perked, listening the way he always listened — for patterns, for danger, for the particular quiet that meant something was about to change.

"So what now?" Ethan asked.

"Now you keep doing exactly what you were already doing." Reyes stood, gathering her own half-finished meal. "Take contracts. Get stronger. Watch your back a little closer than you did before, and trust that Okoro's people are watching harder than you can see." She paused at the edge of the table, something more serious settling into her expression. "And if Vera or her partner ever show up again — you tell someone immediately. Not tomorrow. Not after you've thought it through on your own first. Immediately."

"Understood."

She held his eyes a beat longer, like she was deciding whether he actually meant it, and whatever she found there seemed to satisfy her.

"Good," she said, and left him alone with his coffee, his notebook, and a small violet creature already dozing against his shoulder.

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He sat there a long while after she'd gone, watching the settlement move through its ordinary evening rhythms around him — someone hauling water from the well, a pair of trainees arguing good-naturedly over a drill exercise, the Sunfowl making its usual dramatic nuisance of itself somewhere near the grain silo. All of it exactly as it had been every evening since he'd arrived, except now he found himself cataloguing faces a little more carefully than before, wondering, uselessly, which of them might be the wrong kind of careful.

*This is what they want,* he thought, and the clarity of it startled him a little, arriving whole and unbidden the way his best observations always did. *Not just information. This. People looking sideways at their own neighbors. A settlement too busy watching itself to watch outward.*

He didn't know yet how right that read actually was — had no way of knowing, sitting there with his coffee going cold, that the doubt itself was doing work Undertow hadn't even needed to spend real effort causing, or that somewhere behind all of it sat a patient, calculating man whose name he hadn't even heard yet. But the thought settled into him anyway, alongside everything else from that night worth remembering, and he found himself, for the first time in months, wishing he could talk it through with Sato directly instead of secondhand through people doing their careful, exhausted best to relay it for him.

Mura made a low, questioning sound against his shoulder, sensing the shift in him even without understanding the shape of it.

"Just thinking," Ethan murmured, scratching behind one round ear out of old habit now, automatic as breathing. "Come on. Let's go find somewhere quieter than this to do it."

Three months into a world that had tried to kill him on his first day, and it was apparently, patiently, still trying — just from further away now, and with considerably more patience than before.

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*End of Chapter 7*