said to Esra, bracketing my arms on the wall against which she stood. Her skin, wan with dark shadows under her blue eyes, glowed with a fragile luminance inside her helmet, and I longed to caress her cheek with my fingers, but the air was choked with dust.
“What do you mean?” she asked. “You know I miss signals when I can’t see your eyes.”
“My heart quakes and trembles with every tremor of the ground beneath us,” I said. “This quest was cursed from the beginning, and I would turn back now. Leave this place and disappear into the ikfal with you by my side. Let everything else fall to pieces.”
Esra’s small hand caressed my helmet where my cheek would be. “And the others? Our friends?”
Dipping my head, I sighed but said nothing.
“I see you bowing under the weight of responsibility,” Esra said, her voice sober but filled with compassion. “I don’t blame you for wanting to run away. Say the word, and I will come with you. You know I will.” She rested her hands on my chest panels. That beloved crease formed between her eyebrows, and she looked up at me again. “But I know you won’t abandon this stupid quest or your brothers or their mates. You’re going to see it through, and you’re going to make the Queen wish she was never born, and you’re going to lead the hunters into a new age of empathy and curiosity. And you’re going to save us all.” Tears gathered in her eyes, and I realized it no longer troubled me to see them. She continued. “Not because you want to or because you have to. But because of love. You love your people and your home world and this planet. And all of us. And we love you.”
Dropping to my knees, I let her cradle my head in her bosom.
“You see me, Yasheza,” I said. “In my weakness. You see strength.”
“I love you, Red,” she whispered. “We make each other strong, don’t we?”
“Ik,” I said.
And in a jotik, I had the strength to stand and pass through the Narrows, toward an unknown danger that may cripple us forever. But Esra was right. I would persist because of love—the fragile creature we hunted our entire lives but who caught us instead in its relentless grip and would never release us.