Something in her chest had been doing a strange thing for the last minute or so. Not warmth, exactly. Not recognition, exactly. Something like both of them, mixed in a weird way. The feeling of meeting a person at a station where you had been told you were meeting a stranger, and finding that they looked at you and felt just the way an old friend would, before either of you could explain why.
She had no word for it.
Instead, Hikari just opened her free hand.
The palm came to rest on the floorboard halfway between them. Empty, palm up. The kind of offer that did not need to be explained.
The lizard looked at the hand, then at her face, then it looked at the hand again.
"Are you going to ask why I'm doing this?" it said, and its voice had quieted by an increment. "Or are we just going to let it happen and not discuss it?"
"I'm not going to ask. Raizen will probably tell me more later."
