The cub moved like he knew where he was going.
I didn't. I was following blindly behind a limping baby leopard across a burning beach toward a jungle I couldn't identify on a world I didn't have a name for, and the tide was coming in behind us, and the only thing I was certain of was that standing still was not an option.
So I kept moving.
The beach narrowed as we went. The fire had burned outward from the treeline in a rough arc, and what it had left behind was still hot — scorched earth and collapsed trunks and the particular chemical smell of things that weren't supposed to burn burning anyway. The cub picked through it without hesitating, his nose working, ears rotating, reading something I couldn't access. I tracked his path and stepped where he stepped and tried not to think too hard about the fact that I was taking navigation cues from an animal that had been alive for what looked like a few months at most.
He'd been right about the rock.
So I was going to trust him on the route.
The sand gave way to a margin of low scrub — the same broad-leafed plants from before, less burned here, protected by whatever the stone outcrop had deflected. I crouched as I went, out of habit, keeping my profile low.
Old instinct. Royalty's voice, somewhere at the back of my head: Small target. Low and quiet. Let the space tell you what it is before you announce yourself in it.
The cub glanced back at me.
"I'm here," I said. "Keep going."
He kept going.
The first real tree was enormous — trunk wider than my arm span, bark the deep reddish-black I'd seen from the beach, root structures that arched above the soil like flying buttresses. It had survived the fire intact. Whatever the root system was doing underground, it had been enough. I pressed my palm flat to the bark as I passed it. Warm, but not heat-damaged. Something underneath the surface moved — not visibly, but perceptibly. A slow pulse.
I pulled my hand back.
The cub didn't react. Whatever that was, it wasn't alarming to him.
Noted. Filed.
We moved deeper. The light changed — the harsh flat white of the open beach giving way to something filtered and green, shifting with the canopy above. The sound changed too. The insects came back, different from the beach insects, lower in register. Something called from high in the branches and went unanswered. The smoke smell faded with every step, replaced by something that was almost soil, almost rain, and underneath both of those, something I couldn't name.
Alive. That was the closest I could get. The smell of a place that was alive in a way that didn't need anything from me.
The cub's pace had steadied. His back leg still dragged slightly — I tracked it automatically, the nurse part of my brain running its parallel assessment while the rest of me focused on not tripping over the root structures. The drag was consistent. Not worsening. Soft tissue, no bones showing. He was compensating cleanly, which meant the pain was manageable and his body knew how to work around it.
He should be okay with rest.
Neither of us was going to get rest until we found somewhere to take it.
I looked at what we had. No tools. No food. No water beyond what I could find. Hospital scrubs, ruined past all utility except basic coverage. Two weekends of wilderness training, one camping trip where Imani had insisted on teaching me things I'd spent most of the weekend complaining were unnecessary.
Imani, who had been right about everything, always.
I pushed the thought down before it could open into something bigger. Not yet. Not while we were still moving.
The cub stopped.
Not alarmed — he hadn't gone rigid, his tail was still. He'd just stopped, and was looking at something off to the left that I couldn't see through the undergrowth.
"What," I said quietly.
He looked at me. Then back at the undergrowth. Then he took three deliberate steps left and stopped again.
I followed.
A creek. Narrow, fast-moving, clear — cutting through a break in the root system where the ground dipped. The cub went directly to it and drank without hesitation.
His instincts had been right about the rock. They'd been right about the path. I crouched beside him and tested the water the careful way first — smell, look for anything dead nearby, check the rocks for discoloration — and found nothing alarming, and drank until the hollow ache in my throat eased.
The water was cold and tasted of minerals and nothing wrong.
One problem solved out of however many there were. I wasn't counting.
The cub finished drinking and sat back on his haunches and looked at me with those pale gold eyes in the dimming light. The canopy had deepened overhead. I hadn't noticed the sun moving, but it had.
We needed shelter before dark.
"Okay," I said. "Keep going."
He got up. We kept going.
The vine-things appeared as we moved deeper — thick horizontals crossing the trunks in parallel lines, moving in a way that had nothing to do with wind. I gave them room. The undergrowth thickened and thinned in alternating patches, and the cub navigated the thicker sections with an economy of movement that I tried to mirror and mostly failed at.
The light was going amber at the edges of the canopy when he stopped again.
This time he sat down.
Not alarmed. Not looking at anything in particular. Just — sat, and then looked at me, and then looked at a section of rock face I'd been about to walk past without registering.
I looked at it properly.
A low entrance, half-curtained by a fall of horizontal vine-things hanging loose from a break in the rock. Set into an outcrop where two massive root systems had grown together and pushed the stone apart. The vines stirred in air moving from inside.
Air moving meant it went somewhere.
The cub ducked through without hesitating. I heard his paws on stone, the small sound of him settling, and then quiet.
I pulled the nearest vine aside and looked in.
Dark, but not total. A crack in the ceiling let in a thin column of fading light. Larger than it looked from outside. The floor was dry. The entrance would silhouette anyone coming in.
I swept the space the way Royalty had taught me. Two exits minimum. Know where the light comes from. Know what the sound does.
Entrance behind me. A narrower fissure at the far left wall, exhaling a faint cool draft. The crack above: light and ventilation.
Good enough for now.
The tide was somewhere behind us, muffled by distance and stone and jungle. We'd beaten it.
I pulled the vine curtain back across the opening and went to find the cub.