Chapter 3: The Road Out of Hanamura
Gamma made the request the next morning, over a breakfast he didn't eat, in the same flat, procedural tone he used for everything.
"I require a guide," he said, to the village elder more than to anyone in particular. "Someone familiar with the region. Temporarily."
It wasn't, strictly, a lie. He needed to move through this world without drawing the kind of attention a stranger in strange armor drew by default, and a local face beside him would blunt that considerably. What he didn't say — what he'd decided, somewhere in the quiet after last night's transmission, wasn't anyone's business but his own — was that the calculation had a second half to it. Someone who already trusts me. Unprompted. He still hadn't examined why that thought sat the way it did in his chest. He didn't examine it now, either.
The elder's gaze slid, unhurried, toward Rie.
"I could go," she said, before anyone else had the chance to volunteer her, which surprised precisely no one who'd known her longer than a day.
"Rie—" Yumi started, half warning, half something that sounded suspiciously like finally, some excitement.
"I owe him my life," Rie said simply, cutting off whatever argument Yumi had been building toward. "Twice, if we're counting the second wolf separately." She looked at Gamma directly for the first time that morning. "And someone should probably make sure you don't get yourself killed asking the wrong farmer the wrong question."
Gamma considered this. "Acceptable," he said, and that was, apparently, that.
Yumi caught Rie's sleeve as the elder and Gamma stepped away to discuss supplies, her earlier teasing dropped entirely. "You don't have to do this, you know. He's a stranger. A dangerous one, from the look of those wolves."
"I know." Rie glanced toward Gamma's armored back, unreadable as ever. "That's kind of the point. Whatever he's actually looking for out there — I want to know what it is before it finds its way back to this village on its own."
It wasn't the whole truth. It wasn't a lie either. Rie was getting the distinct impression that whole truths were going to be in short supply around Gamma, and had decided, somewhere between waking up and this conversation, that she didn't entirely mind finding them out the slow way.
They left before noon, the village shrinking behind them into green and distance, the festival's lanterns and noise already feeling like something that had happened to a different version of both of them.
For the first hour, neither spoke. Gamma set a pace that was efficient rather than comfortable, scanning the treeline with the kind of attention Rie associated with soldiers who'd learned the hard way what happened to people who stopped scanning.
It was Rie who finally broke the silence, mostly out of a stubborn refusal to spend an entire journey in total quiet.
"So. Gamma." She fell into step half a pace behind him, close enough to talk without having to raise her voice. "Is that a name, or a rank, or one of those things that's both and you're just not going to explain it?"
"Designation," he said. "Assigned. Not chosen."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the accurate one."
Rie huffed, unimpressed but not deterred. "Fine. Where you're from — do people have names they choose, or is everything assigned?"
That got the smallest pause out of him — not hesitation exactly, more like recalibration, the sense of a question landing somewhere he hadn't expected to be asked. "Some things are chosen," he said eventually. "Most aren't. Depends what you're born into."
"That sounds lonely."
"It's efficient."
"Those aren't the same thing."
He didn't answer that one at all, and Rie decided, for now, to let the silence have it — filing the reaction away the way she suspected he filed everything, in some private ledger she wasn't allowed to see yet.
They walked on. The forest thinned into open fields, gold-green under a sun higher and warmer than the festival night had let on, and gradually — not because either of them decided to, just because walking for hours in silence was a harder thing to sustain than either had expected — the conversation loosened.
"You said you were a lieutenant," Rie tried again, a while later. "Formerly. What happened to the 'currently' version?"
"Ship's gone. Chain of command's scattered across an unmapped planet. Doesn't leave much of a rank to hold onto." He said it without any weight behind it, the way he said most things, but Rie caught something underneath it anyway — not grief exactly, more like a fact he'd already decided not to let hurt him, held at careful arm's length.
"That's a very calm way to talk about your whole world falling apart."
"Panicking doesn't fix hulls."
"No," she agreed. "But it's allowed, sometimes. Even for lieutenants. Formerly or not."
He glanced at her then — the first time all day he'd actually turned his head to look instead of just tracking her voice — and said nothing at all, which Rie was beginning to suspect was the closest thing to I don't know what to do with that his particular vocabulary allowed for.
"What about you," he said instead, redirecting with the efficiency of a man closing an uncomfortable file. "Hanamura. Is that... typical, for your people? Humans and demonkin, together like that?"
Rie huffed something that wasn't quite a laugh. "No. Hanamura's rare. Most places, what I am gets you a very different welcome than what you saw last night." She said it lightly, the way people said things they'd practiced saying lightly for years so nobody would notice the weight still underneath. "Fangs. Eyes. People decide what you are before you've said a word."
Something in Gamma's posture shifted, subtle enough that she almost missed it. "People do that everywhere," he said. "Doesn't make it right. Doesn't stop it happening."
"That's very philosophical for a man who won't tell me his favorite color."
"I don't have one."
"Everyone has one."
"I have a threat-assessment color palette. It's not the same thing."
Rie laughed — a real one, surprised out of her — and for a moment the careful distance between them narrowed by something that wasn't quite trust yet, but was, at the very least, a first honest step toward it.
By the time the light began to slant gold and long across the fields, they'd covered more ground than Rie had expected, and said more to each other than she suspected either of them had planned to. Gamma called the stop for camp with the same clipped efficiency he did everything — scouting the treeline, selecting a defensible rise of ground, already breaking branches for a shelter before Rie had finished catching her breath.
She watched him work in silence for a while, turning something over in her mind before she let herself say it.
"You didn't have to bring me. You could've just left the village and vanished — you're clearly capable of it."
Gamma didn't look up from the shelter frame. "Would've been less efficient."
"Is that really the only reason?"
A pause — longer this time, branch held motionless in his hands. "No," he admitted, finally, quietly, like the word cost him something to hand over. "It wasn't."
He didn't elaborate. Rie didn't push. But something about the admission — small as it was, grudging as it was — settled into the space between them like the first real thing either of them had offered the other since the wolves.
That night, as she drifted toward sleep inside the shelter he'd built with careful, over-engineered precision, Rie found herself thinking that whatever Gamma was actually looking for out here, she wasn't in nearly as much of a hurry to find out the truth and go home as she'd told Yumi she was.
Above the camp, in the dark, Gamma sat watch over her sleep and told himself, once again, that it was simply efficient.
He was getting worse at believing it.