By the time they reached the narrower backstreets behind the fruit stalls, the crowd had thinned and the noise had dulled into the background. The aetheric arrow above the contraption pointed squarely westward, toward a stretch of near-deserted lane where the paving stones gave way to packed dirt, and most of the shops had long since shuttered their doors (even though it was only the sixth bell).
Fabrisse adjusted the dial a fraction. The calibration drifted when he walked too fast.
Severa Montreal was still muttering to herself about the cat, occasionally glancing toward shadows like she expected divine vengeance to emerge. He hadn’t understood why she was so invested in a fruit thief. Her tone, however, suggested theological stakes.
The arrow trembled faster. They were getting close.
He stopped to listen for ambient aether shift, but of course, he wasn’t well-versed enough to hear anything. If he had that sort of skill, he wouldn’t have been swept off his feet by the likes of Cuman.
“Why did you stop?” she asked immediately.
He didn’t answer at once. It was empty, too empty; the kind of emptiness that made the sound of his own thoughts too loud.
“Are you afraid?” She continued.
“Maybe,” he said. “This is an empty field.”
She gave an automatic sort of confidence in reply, “Should anything happen, I will protect you.” He didn’t comment. It seemed unwise to point out that she hadn’t cast a single spell all afternoon, though it would have made their lives that much easier. Then she continued, pointing at the detector still chirping away in his hand. “Why did you even have that thing in the first place? You don’t look like the sort of person who wakes up and thinks, ‘Today I shall hunt cats.’”
He hesitated. It would have been easy to make something up—to say he’d borrowed it for class or was testing a new calibration method—but the lie snagged on itself before it could form. There was no logical reason to lie. Lying introduced variables, inconsistencies, and follow-up questions. It was simpler, cleaner, just to tell the truth.
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