In Nana's defense, the forest looked almost entirely the same in every direction.
This was not a personal failing. This was a design flaw of forests. Someone should have put more landmarks in them — a sign, a distinctive rock, something with a little consideration for people who had been walking for forty minutes and were now quietly suspecting that they had passed this particular cluster of trees at least twice already.
She stopped walking.
She turned in a slow circle.
The trees looked back at her with absolute indifference.
"Okay," she said, quietly, to no one. "This is fine."
It was, objectively, a little bit not fine.
Today's mission had seemed straightforward — a solo sweep of the outer Haeun sector, low-density wanderer activity, just a standard patrol and report. Solo missions were a normal part of the rotation for Class A hunters, a way of building independent field experience, and Nana had accepted the assignment with complete confidence because she had done the prep, read the terrain maps, reviewed the patrol markers —
The patrol markers, she now realized, looked extremely similar to several other types of bark markings that occurred naturally on trees.
She had been navigating by bark for forty minutes.
She pulled out her earpiece. The signal in this part of the sector was patchy at best, dropping in and out between the denser canopy areas. She could call for backup. She absolutely could. She just — hadn't done that yet. Because she was fine. She was just temporarily uncertain of her precise location, which was different from lost, technically.
SWISH —SLASH–!
A sound to her left.
She turned.
Three wanderers at the tree line — medium class, moving with that lurching directed purpose that meant they had locked onto something, which was her, specifically. She reached for her blade kit and planted her feet and started running the mental calculation of angle, timing, the kind of quick-dirty math that training had made semi-automatic —
And then from somewhere above and to the right came a motion that she almost didn't track because it happened so fast —
One. Two. Three.
SWISH—!
The wanderers dissolved in a sequence so clean it looked almost gentle. The particles drifted upward through the afternoon light filtering through the canopy, and from behind the nearest tree stepped someone she recognized immediately by the silver hair and the already-resheathing blade and the complete absence of anything resembling exertion on his face.
Xavier Shen moved the way weather moved. Like he didn't ask the environment for permission.
Nana stared at him from across the small clearing.
He looked at her.
She looked at him.
He looked at the general area around her — at the terrain, the patrol markers, the particular stretch of forest that she had definitely been circling — and then back at her, with an expression that was somehow, without moving at all, asking a question.
"I wasn't lost," she said.
He said nothing.
"I was — recalibrating."
Still nothing. He tilted his head a fraction of a degree.
"The patrol markers in this sector are very ambiguous," she said, with great dignity.
The corner of his mouth moved. It was not a smile, exactly. It was the ghost of an acknowledgment that he had decided against fully committing to. He turned and walked a few paces to a fallen tree trunk at the edge of the clearing, and sat down with the ease of someone who had been using the forest as a living room for years.
Nana considered him for a moment.
Then she walked over.
She stopped in front of him and bowed — properly, both hands, the kind of bow that her mother had drilled into her for years and that she defaulted to when she wasn't sure what else to do with her hands. "Thank you," she said. "For yesterday. I didn't get to say it properly because you left before I could."
He looked at her for a moment with those dark, assessing eyes.
Then he nodded. Once, brief, accepting it without ceremony.
"You were lost," he said. His voice was lower than she'd expected — unhurried, with a flatness to it that wasn't unkind so much as simply economical. Like he had decided at some point that words were a resource to be used efficiently.
"I was recalibrating —"
"For how long."
She pressed her lips together. "...forty minutes."
Something moved in his expression again. Not quite the ghost of a smile this time. More like the internal acknowledgment of a fact.
"Class A hunters usually work in pairs," he said. Not a question. Just an observation, laid down plainly.
"Yes," Nana said. "Usually."
"You're alone."
"Yes."
"Why."
She sat down on the other end of the trunk, because standing while he sat was making the height difference feel even more pronounced and she had feelings about that. "My captain said I needed to choose a partner I trusted enough to fight beside. Someone whose instincts I could rely on." She picked at a piece of bark. "My training partner chose someone else. So now I'm —" she gestured vaguely at the clearing around her, "— doing the recalibrating thing."
A pause.
Xavier looked at the canopy. He had the quality of someone who was listening even when he appeared to be doing something else — like the attention was just distributed differently, less concentrated in eye contact and more spread through the whole of how he held himself.
"Your instincts," he said, "or his."
"What?"
"You said you needed someone whose instincts you could rely on." He glanced sideways at her. "You meant his. Not yours."
She opened her mouth. Then closed it.
She hadn't actually thought about it that way.
"I'm a Class A newbie," she said, a little less certainly. "My instincts are still —"
"You ducked before the first swing yesterday," he said. "Before you'd fully processed the size. Instinct, not calculation." A pause. "Your instincts are fine. You just need someone who won't run."
The Mina situation apparently preceded her.
"She made a tactical decision," Nana said, a little weakly.
Xavier said nothing. The nothing was very expressive.
She turned to look at him, studying the profile — the clean line of his jaw, the silver hair catching what light came through the canopy, the blade kit sitting against his side with the casual presence of something that had been there long enough to become part of his silhouette. "Why a blade?" she asked. "The backup team yesterday said you're S-Class. You could use anything."
He was quiet for a moment. "I can."
"But you use the blade."
"I use both." He looked down at the hilt, briefly. "The blade has my personality."
Nana turned that over. She thought about the way he moved — not like someone executing a technique but like someone expressing something, the motion too clean and too particular to be purely functional. The blade as an extension of intention rather than just a tool.
"That makes sense," she said, without meaning to say it out loud.
He looked at her again. The sideways assessment.
She looked back, and then, because she had never been particularly good at being indirect about things she actually wanted: "I want you as my partner."
The words landed in the clearing and sat there.
Xavier's expression didn't change, exactly. But something in the set of his shoulders shifted slightly — not surprise, more like recalibration of its own kind.
"You don't know me," he said.
"I know you don't run," she said. "I know your instincts are — actually I don't know how to describe your instincts, you move like lightning and I can barely track you, but I know they work. And I know you use a blade because it has your personality, which means you're the kind of person who thinks about things like that." She met his eyes. "That's enough to start with."
He was quiet for what felt like a long time. Long enough that Nana started preparing a graceful retreat speech in the back of her head.
Then — a sound behind and to the left.
Xavier was already moving before she registered what the sound meant.
He stepped in front of her, one hand out — not grabbing, just a clean backward press against her shoulder that said *stay* without saying it — and the blade was out and through before the wanderer that had come out of the underbrush completed its first lunge. One motion. Smooth as water moving around something.
WHOOSH....
The dissolution happened almost before Nana's brain finished catching up.
She stood behind him in the sudden quiet with her hand halfway to her own blade kit, and her heart doing something complicated in her chest that was partly the adrenaline and partly something she didn't have a word for yet.
Xavier sheathed the blade. He turned around. He looked at her outstretched hand, still reaching for a kit she hadn't needed to open.
He stepped back and sat down on the trunk again like nothing had happened.
"Okay," Nana said, to her own heartbeat. "Okay. Yes." She lowered her hand. "So. Partner. Yes or no."
He leaned back slightly, one elbow on the trunk. Looked at the middle distance with the expression of someone thinking about something that was actually entirely separate from the question and enjoying letting that show.
"Not yet," he said.
She blinked. "What?"
"Tomorrow. Plaza near the third transit gate, east sector." He glanced at her sideways. "There's something I need. If you can do it, I'll agree."
Nana stared at him.
"You're — that's a *test?*" she said. "You're giving me conditions —"
"I'm making sure you can handle something I'll need from a partner." Even, unbothered, like this was a completely reasonable thing to say to someone who had just watched him dispatch a wanderer in under two seconds. "If you can't, we're not compatible."
"What is it? What do you need me to do?"
"Tomorrow," he said. "Plaza. Third transit gate."
"Can you not just —"
"Tomorrow."
She looked at him for a long moment. He looked back with perfect equanimity, the blade kit settled against his side, silver hair unmoved by the mild canopy breeze, entirely unaffected by the fact that he had just issued homework for a hunting partnership.
"Fine," she said.
He stood. She recognized the motion — this was the part where he walked back into the trees and became a ghost again.
"Hey," she said.
He paused.
"Which direction is the patrol exit from here?" she asked, with as much dignity as she could carry.
A pause.
He pointed.
"Thank you," she said, very calmly.
He walked into the trees.
He was gone before she'd finished turning around.
.
.
.
.
.
The video call connected at nine forty-seven. Caleb answered it the way he always answered it — like he'd been waiting without wanting to admit he'd been waiting, face arranged into something composed while the connection was still loading.
He had a book open on the desk beside him. She knew from the angle of it that he hadn't turned a page in a while.
"Mission?" he said.
"Fine," she said. "Successful sweep, no complications." She didn't mention the forty minutes of recalibration. "I saw him again."
Caleb's eyes moved from the book to the camera. A very smooth, very controlled movement. "Him."
"Xavier Shen. He was in the sector again." She pulled her knees up to her chest, phone on the pillow. "We talked."
"You talked."
"He sat down. We talked about the mission, about wanderer behavior, about why he uses a blade instead of a gun." She was aware she was talking quickly, the way she did when she was excited about something, the way she had described the amusement park and the new comics volume and every other thing she had ever wanted to share with him since she was five years old. "Gege, he moves so *fast* — like, I don't have another word for it, a wanderer came out of nowhere behind me and he was just *there,* between me and it, in one motion —"
"Behind you," Caleb said.
"I'm fine —"
"A wanderer came up behind you."
"And he handled it. That's the point —"
"The point," Caleb said, in the careful, even tone that she had learned over years meant he was being very deliberate about what he said because several other things were competing to come out instead, "is that there was a wanderer behind you."
"Gege."
"I'm just noting —"
"I know you're noting. You're always noting." She smiled at the screen, because she couldn't help it, because it was one of her favorite things about him even when it drove her absolutely insane — the way he collected every detail she gave him and stored them all somewhere and quietly worried about every single one. "I'm fine. I've been fine. I will call you if I become not fine."
He was quiet for a moment.
"What did you talk about?" he said, finally. His voice was back to even.
"Hunting, mostly. Instincts, partner trust. I asked him to be my mission partner."
The book on the desk did not move.
"He said not yet," she continued, ignoring the quality of the silence coming from the other end of the call. "He has conditions. Some kind of test — I have to meet him at the plaza tomorrow and do something for him, and if I can manage it he'll agree to partner with me." She tilted her head. "I don't know what it is yet. He wouldn't tell me. He just said tomorrow and walked away, which is — he does that, he just disappears —"
"A test," Caleb said.
"Apparently."
"He's making you pass a test for the privilege of being his partner."
"When you say it like that it sounds worse."
"I'm saying it accurately."
"He's S-Class, Gege, he could have anyone — the fact that he's considering it at all is —" she paused, then tried a different angle: "Think of it like an interview. He just wants to make sure we're compatible."
Caleb picked up his tea. Set it down again without drinking any of it. "You've met this person twice."
"Three times, counting today."
"Twice where you spoke."
"And once where he saved my life, which feels relevant."
Caleb's jaw moved slightly. She knew that jaw movement. That was the jaw movement of someone doing the face she had identified in chapter one and that he was continuing to deny having.
"He's a stranger," he said. "Be careful. New people —" he paused, seemed to restructure the sentence. "Not everyone who appears at the right moment is —"
"A good person?" she offered.
"I'm saying be careful."
"You always say be careful."
"Because you have a history of running toward things that haven't proven themselves yet."
She couldn't argue with that one. She looked at him through the screen — the lamp light on his face, the particular set of his mouth that she had always read as worry but now, watching closely, thought might be something slightly different that she couldn't fully name. He looked tired. Not the mission-tired she recognized, but a different kind.
"Are you okay?" she asked.
He blinked. A small, genuine surprise. "I'm fine."
"You look —" she considered. "You look like you're thinking about something."
"I'm always thinking about something."
"The *face* —"
"Nana."
"I'm just saying —"
"I'll be back in less than two weeks," he said. Redirecting, firmly, in the way he had that she used to let work when she was younger. "The strawberry bread. The amusement park. You promised you'd go."
She smiled, softer. "I know."
"So go do your test tomorrow. Call me after." A pause. "And stay in radio range."
"Yes, Gege."
"I mean it."
"I know you do."
She shifted, getting comfortable, pulling the blanket around her shoulders. She was already running through it in her head — the plaza, the third transit gate, east sector. What would an S-Class hunter need from a partner that required a test? Something about instincts, he'd said. About trust. About whether they were compatible.
She wondered what compatible looked like to someone who worked alone.
She wondered what it said about him that he was willing to find out.
"Gege," she said, the thinking drifting sideways into talking the way it always did when she was getting tired. "What do you think he wants me to do?"
"I couldn't say."
"If you were S-Class and you were going to test a potential partner, what would you test?"
Caleb was quiet for a moment. "Whether they followed instructions."
She blinked. "That's it?"
"Whether they could follow an instruction they didn't fully understand, from someone they didn't fully trust yet. That's the hardest thing." A beat. "In the field, you don't always have time to explain. You need someone who moves when you tell them to move, even before they know why."
She thought about the hand on her shoulder — the clean, wordless stay— and the blade already moving before she'd finished processing the threat. The way she'd gone still without thinking about it.
"I already did that," she said quietly.
Caleb looked at the screen. Something moved through his expression that she was too sleepy to read properly. "Then you probably already passed."
She smiled at that, slow and satisfied, pulling the blanket up. "I hope so. I need him, Gege. If he can do the whoosh whoosh with his blade and handle everything, I can focus on the other parts of the mission. The reading the terrain part. The planning part." She yawned into her sleeve. "I won't have to shoot anyone."
There was a long pause.
"Whoosh whoosh," Caleb repeated.
"You know what I mean."
"I genuinely don't."
"The —" she demonstrated vaguely with one hand, the quick flicking motion of the blade, and immediately almost hit herself in the face with her own phone. "The thing he does. Fast. Whoosh."
Caleb looked at the screen.
"Go to sleep," he said.
"I'm just saying he's very fast —"
"Nana."
She laughed, quiet and warm and already half-gone. The blanket rose and fell slowly. He watched the rhythm of it settle into sleep-pace, watched the starfish clip wink in the low light of her apartment, watched her face go soft and unguarded the way it only did when she stopped performing cheerfulness and just existed for a while.
She was already asleep before she finished the next sentence. He wasn't sure she'd even known she was saying it.
It was quiet for a long time after.
He stared at the ceiling of his quarters without looking at it.
*She wants him as her partner,* he thought. *She's already thinking about it like it's certain. Like it's already decided. She's excited in the way she gets excited about things she's chosen.*
Outside, SKYHAVEN turned its slow rotation through the upper atmosphere. Luna City was down there somewhere. The plaza near the third transit gate, east sector. A meeting tomorrow that he wouldn't know about until she called after.
He had twelve days left before he could go back.
Twelve days felt, for the first time, like a specific kind of distance.
The call was still open. He looked at the small screen — her face in the lamplight, completely at peace, completely unaware.
*Don't,* he thought at himself. Not sharply. Just quietly and with a familiar weariness, like saying it to someone who he already knew wouldn't listen.
*Don't. She's happy. She's safe. She's excited about tomorrow.*
*That's enough.*
He looked at the window. Looked back at the screen.
Closed neither.
.
.
.
.
.
To be continued.