### Chapter 10: Small Mercies

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Three days without a contract worth taking meant three days of Mira finding him with alarming regularity, which Ethan had decided, somewhere around the second day, he didn't actually mind.

"Hello again Mr dark and brooding" she said, dropping onto the bench across from him in the kitchen hall without asking, tray balanced in one hand. "If you keep making wrinkles on your forehead you'll lose that baby face in no time"

"Here for more bread?" Ethan said as Mira snatched a piece off his plate, exactly as she had the first time they'd met, exactly as she did every time now, like it had become a ritual neither of them had agreed to out loud. "Yes" she replied.

Ethan disliked it anyway, it certainly wasn't wheat bread, but something that soon disintegrated into a paste that stuck to the roof of your mouth like peanut butter. "Seven months since I got dropped into a swamp." Mira began "Feels like longer. Feels like yesterday. Time's weird here. I don't feel like I'll ever get used to this place.." 

"You never told me about the swamp."

"You never asked." She said it lightly, no real accusation in it, and popped the bread into her mouth before continuing. "Big secret: everyone's got a version of your jungle story. Mine had more mud and considerably less excitement though.. I got very lucky, very fast, and I've been trying to earn that luck back ever since."

She looked at Ethan, her expression turned somber "We are the lucky ones Ethan, they still can't save even half of the new drops that arrive.. some days it's barely a quarter.."

Mira studied him with more warmth than the moment probably called for. "None of us want to be alone here, which is exactly why I keep coming back. You seem broody but I think You just don't know how to ask for company, so I save you the trouble."

Mura, curled in Ethan's lap and technically supposed to be asleep, cracked one eye open at the sound of her voice and made a small, pleased chirrup. Mura then hopped out of Ethan's arms and approached Mira ready for the attentive petting he became so used to.

"Traitor," Ethan told him.

"He has excellent taste," Mira said, reaching over to scratch behind one round ear with the easy familiarity of someone who'd done it a hundred times before. "Speaking of excellent taste — Reyes told me you turned down two contracts this week. The Ashgate tool delivery and the Frostmere escort."

"They were fine. Nothing that needed two linkers."

"Or," Mira said, entirely too pleased with herself, "you're staying close to the settlement because a certain glowing-eyed mystery woman keeps almost-but-not-quite talking to you near the well, and you're hoping proximity eventually turns into an actual conversation."

Ethan felt his ears go warm despite himself. "That's not — she doesn't have glowing eyes."

"Not yet." Mira grinned, delighted at having gotten a reaction. "Give it time. Naomi's earned everything that comes with five links the hard way, from what I hear. You'll know it when you see it, and when you do, you'll probably forget how to speak entirely, based on current form."

"I don't need romantic advice."

"Everyone needs romantic advice, especially a loner like you" She said it with total, cheerful confidence and continued  "Maybe you could get a few pointers from Mura, he knows how to get a ladies attention."

"Yes he's a real lady killer." Ethan replied dryly and Mira chuckled at Ethan's response and finished her food rather quickly saying she had a job to get to. 

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Ethan continued his leisurely day strolling the town and avoided looking at the job postings, perhaps it was his meeting with undertow or Chidi being disagreeable, maybe it was everything he worked for back on earth suddenly not mattering anymore.. but he honestly felt numb.

The evening meal came later than usual, the kitchen hall running behind after a delayed supply delivery, and Ethan found himself sitting across from Priest and two off-duty patrol members he only half-knew, half-listening to settlement gossip while Mura dozed against his side.

The stew was good, same as always — some Ashgate spice blend the cooks used on everything, thick with root vegetables Ethan had stopped questioning months ago. He was halfway through his bowl, mind drifting toward nothing in particular, when Mura went suddenly, completely rigid against him.

Not the alert stillness of danger. Not the readiness before a fight.

Something smaller, and somehow worse for how small it was — a flinch, quick and total, gone almost as soon as it started, followed by a low, wordless sound that Ethan felt more than heard, something that landed behind his own ribs like a held breath released wrong.

*Not that,* Mura seemed to say, though there were no words in it at all, just impression, just feeling. *Please. Not that.*

Ethan set his spoon down.

"You okay?" Priest asked, noticing the shift in him.

Yeah." Ethan looked down at Mura, who had curled tighter against him, tail flat and still in a way it never was, not even when startled by loud noise or sudden movement. "Just — Mura's being weird about the food."

"Vareth get funny about all kinds of things." Priest shrugged, unconcerned, already turning back to his own bowl. "Rook won't go near anything with ashgate spice in it. Nobody knows why. You stop asking after a while."

Ethan almost let it go at that — almost filed it under the same category as a dozen other small, unexplained quirks he'd catalogued about Mura over the months, the way you'd note any strange preference without needing to understand its root.

But Mura didn't relax the way he usually did once a moment of tension passed. He stayed pressed close, small and tense, watching the bowl in front of Ethan with something that read less like distaste and more like grief.

*Grief,* Ethan thought, turning the word over carefully, testing whether it actually fit. *Not fear. Not disgust, exactly. Something closer to mourning.*

He looked down at the stew — ordinary, thick, full of vegetables he'd eaten a hundred times without a second thought — and felt, for the first time since arriving in this world, a small, cold thread of unease that had nothing to do with any creature in the wilderness at all.

"Hey," he said quietly, more to Mura than to the table. "What is it?"

Mura didn't answer. Couldn't answer, not in words, not in anything Ethan could translate cleanly — just curled tighter, and let out one more small, unhappy sound, and went still.

Ethan looked back down at his half-finished bowl, appetite gone, and found he couldn't quite make himself pick the spoon back up.

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He mentioned it to Reyes the next morning, mostly because he didn't know who else to bring something this formless to — not quite a threat, not quite a mystery, just a feeling he couldn't shake and a small creature who still hadn't fully relaxed since the night before.

"Mura's been off since dinner," Ethan said. "Won't eat. Barely wants me to eat, honestly, which — I don't know how a poison-type communicates *concern about food*, but that's the closest word I have for it."

Reyes's expression did something small and complicated, there and gone fast enough that Ethan almost missed it.

"Huh," she said, carefully neutral. "That's new."

"You know something."

"I know Vareth get particular about things sometimes."  She said it a little too quickly, a little too smoothly, and Ethan — three months into learning to read exactly this kind of pattern — felt the old, familiar prickle of *something's being left out* settle behind his sternum.

"Reyes."

"It's probably nothing," she said, which was, Ethan was quickly learning, exactly the kind of thing people said right before it turned out to be something.

She didn't offer anything else, and something in the set of her shoulders told him not to push it — not here, not yet, the same instinct that had told him, all the way back on his first day, not to ask about her missing first name.

But the unease didn't leave. If anything, it settled in deeper, small and patient, the way real questions did when they weren't ready to be answered yet.

Ethan looked down at Mura, still subdued, still not quite himself, and thought, with the same cold clarity that had carried him through many dangerous moments in this world:

*There's something I'm not being told, and it's not something I'd like, so I need to find out what it is*

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*End of Chapter 10