Chapter 13: The Wrong Kind of Answer

He swallowed the capsule two nights after Naomi walked away, alone in his bunk, Mura asleep against his side and utterly unaware of what he'd just done.

It didn't taste like anything. It didn't feel like anything, not at first — just a small, cold weight settling somewhere behind his sternum, gone in seconds, and for one long, foolish moment Ethan wondered if it had simply been nothing at all, a bluff, a test he'd failed by taking seriously.

He walked outside to the outskirts of town and stepped onto a sturdy wooden bridge. The cold night air tasted delicious after sleeping in a humid bunk area shared with other linkers.

Then, two hours later, walking the quiet stretch of road and onto the bridge, was Vera, followed by Cole.

"I wasn't sure you'd actually use it," she said, warm as ever, no trace of surprise in it despite the words. "Most people don't. It's nice to be wrong."

Cole stood a step behind her, quiet as always, watching the tree line with the same patient attention Ethan remembered.

"I have questions," Ethan said. "Not agreement. Questions."

"That's all I've ever wanted from you." Vera's smile deepened, genuine warmth under the careful control. "Ask."

"You told me Vareth will eventually eat their linked humans. Is this really true?" Vera approached Ethan, getting closer, then looked him in the eyes before answering. "Yes. But don't worry, Ethan. Undertow has ways to prevent that. We value human life more than anything."

"I didn't see you when I was a fresh drop. Why aren't you helping with that? Haven can barely save half of the people teleported here."

Vera looked confused. "You didn't know? Undertow was banned from Haven, but we're welcome everywhere else. In fact, we save plenty of fresh drops all the time. We just don't train them to be linkers — that's Sato's game."

"Really? So what happened between Sato and Kade? Why ban Undertow?"

Vera smiled. "That's a good question. You'd think the two would get along, seeing how they both dabble in saving people. But unlike Sato, Kade wanted to stop the Reclaiming... That's what it's called, when a Vareth eats its master, when his cognitive functions become too weak to sustain it."

"Why would Sato not like that?" Ethan asked.

"Because he said it was too cruel. That's right, Ethan — Sato said that the same monsters that eat well over half of everyone dropped off in this god-forsaken world should be allowed to eat their human masters, because devolving them is too harsh!" Vera was visibly shaking with anger at this point, then paused and collected herself.

"Partners," Ethan replied.

"What was that?" Vera said, with a slight laugh.

"I said partners, not masters. It's a symbiotic relationship, Vera."

Vera sighed and regained her composure. "Yes, it's a partnership. But it's a dangerous one for humans."

Ethan asked, "So you devolve yours, like the Cudlings?"

"Not exactly," Vera replied. "We just take away their method of eating. They're very good at adaptation, so we make them physically consume — encourage through linking to absorb food physically. And just like that, you're not on the menu anymore."

Ethan was shocked, and briefly impressed. "Really? That's all it takes?" But then he felt Mura bristle, and felt his growing anger at what he understood was said through his mental connection with Ethan. It suddenly didn't seem such a clean solution. "Did you do that to your Vareth?" he asked.

"No," Vera answered. "Neither did Cole. But it's an option available to us." Something flickered behind her eyes, old and complicated. "That's not nothing, Ethan, whatever else you think of how we got there."

"How did Kade find out this method?"

"How else? Cudlings. He was part of the necessary evil that Sato approved, for the greater good," Vera said. "Long before any of this. Before you'd believe half of what I could tell you about who he used to be." She studied Ethan's face, reading something in it she seemed to find satisfying. "Would you like to meet him?"

Ethan didn't answer, which was answer enough.

"Haven built something clean-looking on top of something it never wanted to examine," Vera said, quiet now, no performance left in it at all. "We just stopped pretending the examining wasn't necessary."

"First — what does it actually cost the Vareth you do it to? If it's so great, why not force yours to devolve?"

Something in Vera's expression tightened, the first real crack he'd seen in her composure since they'd met.

"Nothing's free," she said. "Not here. Not anywhere."

That was when the air changed.

Ethan felt it before he understood it — Rook's cold, familiar presence registering somewhere at the edge of his awareness a half-second before Reyes stepped out from the tree line, machete already drawn, expression carved from something Ethan had never seen on her before.

"Reyes—"

"Don't." The word came out flat, final, aimed as much at herself as at him. "Don't you dare explain this to me right now."

Vera's warmth vanished entirely, replaced by something sharp and immediate. "This wasn't the arrangement," she said, eyes cutting to Ethan. "You brought backup, Cole! It's an ambush!"

"I didn't—" Ethan started, but Reyes was already moving, Rook surging forward in a blur of frost and fury, and whatever Ethan had meant to say died under the sudden, violent reality of the fight breaking open around him.

"You've been talking to Undertow," Reyes said, voice raw even as she moved, even as Rook's claws raked toward Cole's suddenly-summoned water-shape. "Behind everyone's back. After everything—"

"It's not what you think—"

"It's not about what I think! It's about what you did!"

Cole's Mireel met Rook mid-strike in a hiss of steam and shattering ice, and Vera's Emberlyn erupted from its resting size into something huge and burning, wings of fire unfurling, and Ethan found himself caught in the exact center of a fight he hadn't started and couldn't stop, Mura already leaping from his shoulder, tail puffing wide, instinct taking over where words had failed.

Not against them, Ethan thought toward him, desperate. Reyes. Protect Reyes.

Mura didn't hesitate. A burst of disorienting spore-dust caught Marrow's leading edge as the lean, feline shape lunged for Reyes's blind side, scattering its rhythm just enough for her to twist clear.

"I didn't set this up!" Ethan shouted, over the chaos, over Emberlyn's roar and Rook's answering shriek of frost. "Reyes, I swear to you, I didn't—"

"Then why are you here!" Reyes's voice cracked on the question, more grief than accusation now, and something about that crack hurt Ethan far worse than her anger had.

He didn't have an answer that would sound like anything but exactly what it was.

Somewhere in the chaos, low to the ground, coiled and near-invisible in the trampled grass, Needlefang had never stopped watching him.

Ethan didn't see the strike coming. He felt it — a small, sharp sting low on his calf, easy to mistake a kicked-up stone in the confusion of the fight.

It didn't last long — three creatures locked in genuine, dangerous combat was too costly for anyone to sustain, and Vera called it first.

"Enough." Emberlyn's flame guttered, shrinking back toward its resting size on command, and Mireel dissolved into retreating mist a heartbeat later. "This isn't the day for this."

"You're just going to walk away," Reyes snapped, Rook still bristling beside her, ice crackling off its claws.

"For now." Vera's eyes found Ethan's one last time, something unreadable in them — not quite betrayal, not quite disappointment, something closer to genuine regret. "I thought you were different, Ethan... And you should know, I don't forget easily, and neither does Undertow."

They were gone in seconds, the road settling back into ordinary silence.

"Start talking," Reyes said, voice shaking now, no anger left to hide the hurt underneath it. "And it had better—"

It wasn't until his vision blurred at the edges, the ground tilting subtly under him, that Ethan understood something was wrong.

Poison, he thought, distant and strange, watching his own hand shake without quite feeling it happen. 

Mura was on him before the thought finished, small body pressed flat against his chest, and Ethan felt something shift through the bond that he'd never felt before — Mura actively reaching through the link toward whatever was spreading through Ethan's blood.

*No!* Mura's presence said, fierce and absolute, layered with panic. *Not this. Not you.*

Something answered in Ethan — some latent, unfamiliar current he'd never once felt before, rising up through the same channel Mura was pulling on, instinctive and utterly new. 

The world went white at the edges, then dark entirely, Ethan's knees folding beneath him mid-sentence, Reyes's alarmed voice the last thing he heard before it all went silent.

End of Chapter 13