Chapter 412: 412. They Really Need Some Good Award From Me! (But Let’s See First)

"I’m not saying it to credit him," Nerith said. "I’m saying it because it’s data."

"People who make calculations that they’re not going to follow through on don’t do that..."

"People who say they’ll act for the group and don’t mean it don’t take an arrow for someone who wasn’t their immediate concern." She paused. "I know what he is..."

"I’ve read the deep signal in the canyon stone, and I know what kind of presence registers down there and how it registers."

"Rex doesn’t read like a threat to the things that matter to me, but... he reads like something that has a place in the larger structure of things." She finally looked up. "I’m aware that’s a strange thing to say."

"But still... I’m saying it anyway because it’s true, and I’d rather you heard it from me directly than form an impression from what I don’t say."

Rex looked at her for a moment. "Thank you," he said.

’How fucking ironic... she almost got a rape treatment from me, and yet she got a reason to defend me.’

"I’m not saying it for you," Nerith said.

"I’m saying it for me, who trusted you... and even nature did too." But the leaves had shifted into the warmer, more open motion that they did when she was comfortable rather than on guard, which Rex noted and filed.

Aisella was looking at Nerith with the expression of someone who has just heard something put into words that she had been circling around without finding the center of.

"That’s it," she said. "That’s the thing I kept trying to articulate and couldn’t."

She looked at Rex. "You don’t read like a threat to us, that’s for sure, because you’ve been the savior all the time."

"I’ve been in healing work long enough to know what it feels like to be near someone who is a threat to the people they’re with, and you don’t feel like that. Not to us. Not to this group."

Aisella smiled. "Mireya doesn’t remember everything you’ve done for Aethelgard..."

"Mireya thinks you’re a threat to everyone eventually," Talyra said, without particular judgment in it. "She thinks the calculation will change when we stop being useful."

"What the fuck...?" Rex said. "Did she really say that...?"

"She said it to us on the walk back too," Talyra said. "Before she said it at the table."

"She was working out the argument." She looked at Rex steadily. "I told her she was describing someone who’s honest about how the world works rather than someone who’s different from other people in a significant way."

"She didn’t accept that."

"She won’t accept it tonight either," Aisella said. "But the three of us are going to say what we believe, and what we believe is what it is."

"She can have her position, but still... she just won’t have the table."

Nerith said quietly, "If she keeps pushing it in Aethelgard, the same thing will happen there."

"The people who know what he’s done consistently are more than the people who have her version of one canyon afternoon."

"That’s a generous way to put it," Talyra said.

"It’s an accurate way to put it," Nerith said, and there was a finality in her voice that was not aggressive but was not movable either.

Rex ate his bread and looked at the three of them, and he thought: this is what maximum bond looks like when it has had time to take its particular shape in a person. Not just devotion, which would have been useful enough on its own.

Something more integrated than that, something that had absorbed the specific texture of who he was and reorganized itself around it so thoroughly that defending him and believing in him and reading the structural signal of him had become the same thing.

Talyra’s version was practical and tested, the conviction of someone who had applied their own standards and found them acceptable.

Aisella’s version was warm and precise, rooted in the healer’s understanding of what a person’s presence communicated about their intentions.

Nerith’s version was the most unusual of the three, the deep-channel nature reading that said whatever Rex was registered differently in the old root networks than threat registered, and that she’d decided to trust that register over the argument.

None of it was uncritical. He had noticed this specifically.

None of them had said he was fully beneficial. They had said he was theirs, which was a different thing entirely and, in the specific context he was operating in, considerably more useful.

"She’s going to bring up Apollo," Rex said.

"She always brings up Apollo," Talyra said, with the dry precision of someone who has heard a particular argument enough times to have developed a shorthand for it. "She’ll be all like..."

"Ohhh... Apollo wouldn’t have done this... Apollo would have found another way."

"And what are you going to say about that?" Rex said.

Talyra looked at him with an expression that was very close to amusement. "I’m going to say that Apollo was on both knees on a canyon floor with his designation suppressed," she said.

"The version of the situation in which we trust Apollo’s approach is the one where Apollo does not return." She paused. "Rex is not Apollo, and Apollo is Apollo."

"They’re not interchangeable, and treating Rex as a failure to be Apollo is not a framework I’m going to accept."

"She’ll say he would have found a different way," Nerith said.

"Then I’ll ask her what the way was," Talyra said. "Specifically..."

"She won’t have an answer, because there isn’t one, and the absence of an answer is the answer."

Aisella looked at her with the slight expression of someone who respects an argument but is noting something about its edges. "She’ll say the absence of a visible alternative doesn’t mean one didn’t exist," she said.

"And I’ll say that when you’re making a decision in real time in a canyon, the absence of a visible alternative is what you have to work with," Talyra said. "Theory is not the reality that Rex was facing."

Rex looked at Talyra. "You’ve thought about the matter more than I expected," he said.

"I thought about it on the way back here," she said. "I had three days and I wasn’t doing anything else."

She looked at him directly. "I think about everything you do."

"I’ve been doing it since the island. It’s not a comfortable habit, and I’m not going to stop."

Rex held her gaze for a moment. Then he looked at Aisella, who was staring at the table with a slight expression that suggested she had just heard something intended for one specific person in the room and was contemplating whether to acknowledge it.

She decided not to. She looked up.

"I’ll follow Talyra’s lead on the Apollo argument," she said. "I don’t think I can make it better."

"At least... I can add the part about the categories, about the system failing first, and about what it feels like to be in the category they remove."

"That’s useful," Rex said.

"I know," she said. "That’s why I’m doing it."

She paused. "Rex."

Rex looked at her.

"I want you to know that I’m not doing this task because you asked," she said. "I would have said these things whether you’d asked or not."

"I’m saying them because they’re true and because I don’t want Mireya’s version to be the one that follows you back to Aethelgard." She looked at him steadily. "You came into that canyon for us."

"The least I can do is say what I actually think in front of a dinner table." 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

Nerith had returned to staring at her plate, but the leaves were performing a slow, continuous wave that Rex had learned to interpret as her expression of a feeling she was experiencing but not willing to share for anyone’s benefit. It was present and warm and entirely inward, and he noted it in the same way he noted everything that mattered and set it aside to think about later.

"The three of you..." Rex smirked. "Really deserves some good award from me just for that."

"But let’s see it first..."

Talyra, Aisella, and Nerith flinched, fully aware of what Rex was referencing. They couldn’t hide their anticipation, evident on their faces.

After that, they ate. The meal proceeded around them, and the conversation at the table shifted through the usual topics regarding a returning expedition that had faced challenges and successfully made its way back.

’I’m such a fucking genius to steal Nerith first because I know that her nature power is going to be helping me a lot from the truth...’

’Now... I just need to think of a way to punish her for sure, and I’ll make sure Apollo didn’t wake up.’