"This will help," she said, rubbing her temples. "We still make mistakes. But now we can talk before more hunters come again. We can understand the danger."
"Can I suddenly speak your language?" he asked, testing his tongue.
"A little," she said. "Enough to hear the shape of it. Enough to know when you are hearing a threat. Your tongue is stubborn, Marcus. It holds onto its own shapes. It will take time."
"Story of my life," he said.
He rubbed his temples once, trying to massage the headache away.
"Alright," he said, sitting back down. "Now that we've all played psychic charades…"
He opened his hand again and slammed the coin onto the table. It made a heavy, dull sound.
"…tell me what this means."
Marked
Eira's gaze snapped to the dark metal in Marcus's hand. Her reaction was instantaneous and visceral—her pupils contracted, her breath hitched, and she looked at the coin as if it were a radioactive isotope.
"This is a bad thing," she said, her voice dropping to a whisper that barely carried over the hum of the appliances. "Very bad."
Liri, catching her sister's terror, drew her knees up under her chin on the bench seat. She wrapped her arms around her shins, making herself small, her wide eyes fixed on Marcus's fist like it contained a live grenade.
Marcus closed his fingers gently around the coin again, shielding it from their sight but feeling its unnatural warmth pulse against his palm. "I'm getting that impression," he said dryly. "Bad how? Cursed? Radioactive? Going to explode?"
Eira searched for the right words. You could see them lining up behind her eyes, the language transfer taking hold faster now.
"In our tongue, we call it hesh-kel," she said. "Mark-stone. It is not just metal. It is a beacon. It tells the Hunters you are not just noise in the world anymore. You are..." She made a fist with her right hand, then extended her index finger, pointing it directly at his chest. "Chosen. Target. A piece on the board."
"Chosen target," Marcus repeated, the words settling heavy in his gut. "Neat."
"They do not want you to die fast," she added quietly, her eyes dark. "If they wanted you dead, they would have sent fire through the door. This mark... it means they want you to stay in the game. So you can suffer. So you can be hunted properly."
Liri flinched at the word suffer, burying her face in her knees.
"Comforting," Marcus muttered, leaning back against the vinyl seat. It squeaked in protest. "So I'm on the VIP list and they want me alive. Great. Why me? Why not just burn the place down?"
Eira nodded slowly. "You broke their hunt," she said. "You stood between the predator and the prey. You made the Gate spit them out. Hunters hate that. It insults them. They mark the one who ruins their sport so they can find him again."
"Yeah, well, they shouldn't have walked into my place going after you two," Marcus said, his voice hardening. "That's on them. I didn't ask for a dimension war, but I wasn't going to let them turn my dining room into a slaughterhouse."
He looked from Eira to Liri and back again. "So what now? Is your cavalry coming? Your people going to send a thank you fruit basket or another set of pig faces to finish the job?"
Her mouth twisted into a bitter line. "My people think we are gone," she said. The word was heavy, final. "Taken through the wrong side of the Slip. Lost to the void. They will not come. Not soon. Maybe ever."
The way she said "gone" made his chest tighten. He knew the sound of that word. It lived too close to "dead." It was the word used for patrols that stopped radioing back.
The coin pulsed faint heat into his palm again, like a heartbeat synced to his own. A reminder.
Old training uncurled in the back of his mind, cold and efficient. It began building threat maps, contingency trees, escape routes. Calm and control. You never stop being afraid. You just stop letting fear drive the bus.
He blew out a slow breath, puffing his cheeks. "Alright," he said. "If the cavalry isn't coming, we dig in. We start smaller. You two have food in you. No one is shooting at us right this second. The door is locked. First problem..."
He nodded at them, taking in their exhausted postures, their torn clothes.
"Where were you going to sleep tonight?"
The question landed like a rock in a quiet pond, the ripples spreading out to touch every insecurity in the room.
Liri's arms tightened around her legs. Eira's expression flickered—a crack in the armor—just for a moment, before she smoothed it out into stoic resolve.
They had not thought that far ahead. They had only thought about surviving the next ten seconds.
Sky-Bond
"In the wild," Eira said at last, her voice soft, "in our forest, we would sleep under a tree. High in the branches if we could climb, or hidden in the roots. Far from the Gate. Hunters smell the Gate. We do not make fire. We do not dream, for dreams are loud."
Liri made a small, unhappy sound, a whimper that she tried to stifle.
Marcus pictured them out there by themselves... in that alien, black-barked forest he had glimpsed through the window, with the mist glowing gold and pig-faced things moving between the trunks, hunting by scent.
"Yeah, that's not happening," he said firmly. "I'm not sending you back out there. Not after all this. Not tonight."
Eira studied him. Her gaze was intense, dissecting him layer by layer.
"You understand," she said slowly, "that where I come from... when you pull someone back from death like that, when you stand in the blood for them... there is a bond."
He raised an eyebrow. "The life-debt thing? Like in the movies?"
She nodded, though she didn't know what a movie was. "We call it sky-bond," she said. "If you stand between someone and the dark, and you take a mark for them... their life ties to yours."
She tapped her chest, right over her heart. "Not like a slave. A slave is forced. This is... more like a rope. If you die, I feel the cut. If I die, you feel the cut. Our paths twist together. We become the same strand."
Liri nodded vigorously from her corner. "It is a very old rule," she added, her voice muffled by her knees. "Bards make songs about it. Usually very stupid songs with too much lute."
Eira shot her sister a look, then pushed herself to her feet. She moved with purpose.
Marcus frowned, sitting up straighter. "You alright?"
She swallowed once, then walked around the end of the table. She stopped in front of him, very close. He could smell the ozone scent of her magic fading, replaced by sweat and the clean smell of the soap he used in the restrooms. From here he could see the tiny scar over her left eyebrow, the faint dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose, the way her pupils stayed just a little too wide in the dim light.
Without a word, she went down on one knee.
It wasn't clumsy. It wasn't submissive. It was ritual. Precise.
She took his right hand—the one not holding the coin—in both of hers. Her fingers were warm, calloused from use, and surprisingly strong. She lifted his hand slowly, reverently, and pressed his knuckles against the center of her chest, just above her heart.
He could feel her heartbeat under his skin. It was fast, fluttering like a bird, but strong. Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
Marcus froze. His breath caught in his throat.
"Eira... you don't have to..."
Her eyes lifted to his. They were clear, green, and absolutely certain.
"I choose to," she said. Her English was careful now, deliberate, but the meaning was solid as stone. "You pulled death away from me. You held your ground when others would have run. You fed us. You carry the hunter's mark in your flesh because of us."
Her cheeks colored faintly, a flush of pink rising up her neck.
"So now," she whispered, "I am yours."
The words hit him harder than the shotgun recoil had earlier.
Immediate alarms went off in the back of his skull. Danger. Complication. Liability.
He had seen gratitude take this shape before. Jungle nights in countries he wasn't supposed to be in. A village girl with a woven bracelet pressing his hand to her chest and calling him "my breath" after he dragged her brother out of a ditch. A map meeting two days later where the intelligence officer explained how the bad guys knew their patrol route too well because someone talked.
Pretty and grateful could still be dangerous. You could thank someone without handing them the keys to your life.
But looking at Eira, he saw no deception. No calculation. No sales pitch. Just fierce, bewildered loyalty from someone who had expected to die and was stunned to be breathing.
He cleared his throat, trying to gently extract his hand, but she held firm.
"Where I'm from," he said gently, "when someone says 'I am yours,' it usually means more than you think. It can mean romance. Love. Sharing a house. Sharing a bed."
Her blush deepened, turning her ears pink, but she did not let go. She pressed his hand harder against her chest.
"We have that word too," she said. "Mate. This is not that. Not yet."
A small, crooked smile tugged at the corner of her mouth, lightening the gravity of the moment. "This is a promise first. Heart later, maybe. But I do not dislike looking at you."