She'd been doing reconnaissance. She'd looked at those beams and thought, "Those will hold me." Filed it away. Because she was a person who lived in a world where knowing which beams would hold your weight was just practical. Kaya turned around, her face no triumph, no anger, no adrenaline.
The focused clarity of someone who has done what was necessary and is now checking for what comes next. Her eyes moved over Cole. "Hurt?" she said. Cole opened his mouth, closed it. "No," he said, "no, I'm no."
She checked the front door, both windows, the hall, the bedroom. Came back to the main room. Looked at the damaged blood on the floor, the table in pieces, two chairs that were now memory. Looked at Cole. "You're going to ask questions," she said.
Not accusatory, not resigned. "Accurate." "Yeah," Cole said, "I think I am." "Not tonight." He looked at the floor, at the blood, at what had been his dining set.
"Fair enough." She went to the bedroom. Cole stood in the wreckage of his room and looked at the ceiling and thought about beams for a long time. Morning, the east window light landing on the same spot of floor it always found. Cole had made the good coffee because the previous night had involved his furniture being destroyed and he felt that justified it.
He was at the table, still functional if you didn't stress the left joint. When Kaya came out, she sat down across from him, which she'd started doing sometimes, and which he still didn't know how to respond to without somehow making her stop. He poured her a cup and said nothing. She drank, he waited outside. Biscuit at the corral fence making her feelings about breakfast known, pointed and rhythmic.
Early birds. The dry wind off the flat. You want to know, Kaya said. If you want to tell me. She looked at the coffee cup, turned it slightly in her hands.
He'd started noticing that. The way she touched things she was thinking through. As if contact was part of the process. When she spoke, she spoke carefully. Not because she was translating.
Her English was precise, had always been in the few sentences he'd heard from her, but because the words cost something, and she wasn't spending carelessly. My mother died, she said. I was seven. He didn't move. The way you don't move when something wild is close enough to touch.
My father didn't know what to do with a daughter after that. A pause. My brother River Wolf, he took me with him. Hunting. Fighting.
She looked at the cup. He taught me everything he knew. "He taught you well," Cole said. "He taught me too well." The words came out flat.
The kind of truth that had been held long enough that the anger drained out, leaving only shape. When I was 15, warriors came for marriage. She picked up the cup, set it down without drinking. I could beat them in horse races, track better, shoot farther. A beat.