Page 40 of Katya and the Young God

She checks her small travel watch, an old-fashioned watch with a light-up face, and it’s near 6 AM. Unless she’s mistaken, she’s slept for nearly 10 hours.

The three headlamps light up the room, casting everything in deeper shadow, ruining her eyes to the darkness they leave everything else in, so she digs out her own headlamp and fits it over her hair.

The moment her lamp clicks on, they fall silent, their lights sweeping over to her.

She waves, small, rolling her shoulder and shaking out her hand to get some feeling back, before fitting her feet back into her boots and stepping as lightly as she can over to them.

Feketer gives her an unreadable look as she sits near them, digging into one of her meal bars, but she can deal with that.

“Sleep well?” Nathan asks with a smile, passing her a canteen of cold coffee.

“Never slept in a cave before,” she says, as light as she can.

Feketer only raises an eyebrow at her, before shrugging and taking the canteen of coffee from her. “Would have thought you would have, with all the stories people tell of you.” There’s a strange, guarded tone to his words.

“They’re exaggerated.” She locks eyes with him as she takes the coffee back and takes another swig. “You up with the dawn again?”

“Who can tell,” he replies, dry.

Nathan takes the canteen of coffee from her, his hand brushing against hers as he does so in the most un-subtle way possible, and Katya swallows back her initial instinct to tell him off. “This entire group is crazy,” he says, and the look he gives Katya is warm and inviting, like telling her a secret.

She doesn’t want any secrets he could tell her.

“I’ve never seen a cave this weird before,” Charlotte says, and her voice is quiet, breathy, and Katya doesn’t know if she’s heard her speak this entire time. “I can only imagine what’s beyond that stone.”

“Or how that half-god is going to take it down,” Nathan speaks over her, not cruelly, but showing that he’s used to doing so. Just talking over those around him like it’s the easiest thing in the world. “I didn’t see him pack any rock breaking equipment.”

Katya exchanges a look with Feketer, the quick look of trying to decide how much to tell people, how much they know. What they can divulge without it being patently too much.

“Magic,” Feketer says, after too long of a lull. “It’s not going to be brought down by anything other than magic.”

Both the normal humans blink at him, but by now they’ve seen stone Golems walk and a Vampire see without blinking, so she doesn’t know why this would surprise them.

“I’m not entirely certain, either,” Katya gives them, to smooth out the awkward edge. “It’ll be interesting to see.”

Nathan leans more towards her, his body language obviously inviting, and Katya briefly meets the young woman’s eyes in the age-old language of ‘can you believe this guy’ before she studiously leans back a bit, hiding the motion in rolling out her shoulder.

“Do you need help with that?” He asks, and his hand is already reaching for her shoulder before he even asks.

Before she can actually stop herself, she bats his hand away in a small motion, so small a fission of surprise briefly crosses Nathan’s face.

“It’s not that sort of injury,” she says, digging her own fist into the muscles around her scar tissue. “But thanks.”

Charlotte coughs into her hand in an ill-disguised laugh.

“Seriously, I have taken classes,” he says, and his hand falls down, resting on Katya’s knee, and it’s only because of years of self-control that she doesn’t reach down and break his fingers. “It’s okay for you to accept help.”

She considers breaking his fingers anyways, but they probably need him to have full use of the hand later, so she merely picks up his hand and moves it off her knee. “I know my body better than you,” she says bluntly. If she can’t hurt him, she can at least be rude about his actions.

Feketer whistles under his breath, his eyebrows raised.

Nathan smiles, and with a sinking feeling Katya just knows he’s going to take that as some sort of invitation. “Let's get out of this cave and then we’ll see.” He places the hand back against her knee, just resting against it, like he honestly thinks that’ll work.

Done with it, Katya stands, thrusting the canteen of coffee back at Feketer without looking, going back to her own pack instead of answering, because there is no world where she wants to think about a reply that’s polite enough for mixed company.

Around them in the cave, more and more people awake, with various levels of grumbling and shuffling around, and more and more headlamps flick on, bathing the room in more and more light.

The more light gets added, the more the glittering dark wall stands out, the more the disquieting feeling echoes in her bones, and she drinks from her own supply of lukewarm water and mindlessly munches on the meal bar, staring at the seal.

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