They heard Thessarn before they saw him.

  Or rather, Jessica heard something ... a shift in the cave acoustics that didn't match the Umara, whose movements she'd been learning to read over two days of observation. Too heavy. Too deliberate. Coming from the upper passage that Vorrin had flagged as a secondary entrance on his third scan, the one he'd marked as structurally questionable and suggested they avoid.

  She had time to think that's not one of us before Vorrin said it through the comm, sharp and low: "We have company."

  Thessarn emerged from the upper passage the way he did everything ... unhurried, upright, with the particular stillness of something that had decided long ago that urgency was a form of weakness. The crane-like lines of him caught the Umara's bioluminescence and threw thin shadows across the cave wall. He looked at them the way you look at something you'd been expecting to find eventually.

  "You've been busy," he said.

  "Thessarn." Vorrin's voice had gone to its tactical register, flat and emotionless, giving nothing away. "This is a restricted observation window."

  "Your restriction. Not mine." His gaze moved across the cave, taking in the Umara at the water source, the stone pilings, and the art on the eastern wall. Something moved through his expression that Jessica couldn't name. No surprise. Something older than surprise. "How long have you been here?"

  "Two days," Jessica said.

  He looked at her. Of all of them, Thessarn always seemed to find Jessica first in a room, which she'd decided was either a compliment or a warning and possibly both. "And what have you concluded?"

  "That they talk in light. That they make art. That they remember their dead." She kept her voice level. "That they have seven days. Had. Five now."

  "Four," Vorrin said quietly. "The structural degradation is accelerating slightly."

  Thessarn nodded, as if this confirmed something. He moved further into the cave, and Jessica tracked him, watching the Umara's reaction ... a ripple of dimmed bioluminescence as they registered his presence, then a slow return to their patterns. Curiosity, maybe. Or the cave-dweller's pragmatic acceptance of things that didn't immediately threaten.

  "You intend to take them," Thessarn said. Not a question.

  "A breeding population. Yes." Vorrin. "Within the parameters ..."

  "Within the parameters." There was no mockery in it. Just repetition, the way you repeated something to examine it. "You've been watching them for two days. Watching them speak to each other. Watching them tend their dead. And you've concluded that taking a breeding population..." He paused. "How many?"

  "We're still assessing."

  "How many, Vorrin?"

  A beat. "The water source is the constraint. If it's compromised in the collapse..."

  He didn't finish the sentence because the cave finished it for him.

  *  *  *

  Jessica would reconstruct it later, in the specific way your mind reconstructed things that happened too fast for real-time processing, assembling the sequence from fragments.

  The sound first... not an explosion exactly, more a compression, a sudden wrongness in the air pressure that her suit registered before her ears did. Then the upper passage where Thessarn had entered, the structurally questionable one, coming apart in a cascade that started at the ceiling and moved down with the slow inevitability of something that had been waiting for permission. Vorrin's voice in her comm, clipped and urgent. Deke yelling something. The Umara scattering from the water source in a pulse of frantic light.

  And then the section of cave wall between her and the main passage came down.

  Not all of it. Enough. A fall of rock that filled the gap with rubble chest-high, passable maybe with equipment and time, impassable right now in the immediate choking dust of it. She heard Vorrin on the other side almost immediately... “Jessica, report...” and got her suit's atmosphere filter cycling and coughed and said she was fine, she was okay, give her a second. At least she hoped she was okay.

  "I'm with her."

  Thessarn's voice. From somewhere to her left in the settling dust.

  A pause from Vorrin's side. Longer than it needed to be. "Thessarn."

  "We're both uninjured. The passage is blocked but not collapsed entirely. Give me the structural assessment when you have it."

  Another pause. Then, with the specific quality of someone choosing to be professional when they would prefer not to be: "Working on it. Sit tight."

  The dust settled slowly. Jessica's helmet lamp cut a pale cone through it. She found Thessarn six feet away, standing with his hands loose at his sides, examining the fall of rock with the expression of someone solving a logistical problem. His own equipment... minimal, she noticed, almost nothing... had a small light source that he clicked on without drama.

  The cave around them was smaller now. A pocket, maybe thirty feet across, with the water source still intact at the far end. Still functional. Still running in its thin ribbon from the wall into the dark pool.

  The Umara were still in here, too. Eight of them, huddled at the far edge of the space, their bioluminescence very dim and very still. Frightened, Jessica thought. Or whatever the Umara equivalent of frightened was.

  She became aware, slowly, that the air smelled different. Something underneath the dust. Something chemical and sharp that hadn't been there before.

  "Vorrin," she said. "The structural compromise. Do you have a cause yet?"

  The pause was a fraction too long.

  "Working on it," he said again. And then, quieter, clearly not meant for her: "Khamm, pull the seismic data from the last six hours."

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  Jessica looked at Thessarn. He was already looking at her.

  "Do you know what that was?" she said.

  Something moved across his face. There and gone. "No," he said. And then, with a precision that told her he'd chosen the word carefully: "Not specifically."

  She filed that away.

  *  *  *

  Vorrin's assessment came twenty minutes later. The blockage was clearable but not quickly... two hours minimum with the equipment they had, longer if the surrounding rock needed stabilizing first. The upper passage was fully collapsed. They were not in danger of further immediate collapse in their current pocket. The Umara appeared uninjured.

  "Sit tight," Vorrin said, for the second time, and Jessica could hear in the specific flatness of it that he was furious and managing it.

  "We'll be fine," she said.

  "I know you will." A pause. "Jessica."

  "I know," she said. "I'm fine."

  She clicked the comm to standby and looked at the cave around her. At the water source, still running. At the Umara, beginning very slowly to relax from their tight cluster, the bioluminescence returned in cautious increments. At Thessarn, who had settled himself onto a flat section of rock near the wall with the patience of someone who had waited out worse things than this.

  She went and sat near the water. Not near him. Near the water, where one of the Umara had begun to move again, picking its careful way back toward the stone pilings.

  They sat in silence for a while.

  "Your species has pets," Thessarn said.

  It wasn't how she'd expected the conversation to start. "What?"

  "Domesticated animals kept for companionship. Humans do this." He said it without judgment, a statement of documented fact. "I've read about it."

  Jessica looked at him. "Yes."

  "Interesting practice." He watched the Umara at the stone pilings. "The animal doesn't choose the arrangement."

  "No."

  "It's brought into a home, fed, sheltered. Given a life it didn't select and couldn't refuse." He turned his pale eyes toward her. "You don't find that troubling."

  "I find lots of things about human history troubling," Jessica said. "But a dog in a warm house isn't high on the list."

  "The dog doesn't consent."

  "The dog doesn't have the cognitive framework to consent to most things that happen to it." She kept her voice even. "That's not the same as being harmed by them."

  "Isn't it?" He gestured toward the Umara ... a small, precise movement. "They didn't consent to the mining operation destroying their cave. We didn't consent to the asteroid that killed my planet. No one consented to existing in a universe that will end them regardless of what any of us do." He folded his hands. "Consent is the luxury of beings with enough information and enough power to exercise it meaningfully. The rest of us simply... experience what happens."

  Jessica was quiet for a moment. The Umara at the pilings placed a stone with its characteristic deliberateness, adjusted it once, and stepped back.

  "Yet you still claim saving creatures without their consent is wrong… Let me ask you something," she said.

  He waited.

  "Did your species have pets?"

  A pause. "We had companion animals, yes. Different word."

  "Okay. Companion animals." She turned to face him fully. "Say your house is on fire. Your family is out, they're safe, everyone's accounted for. But you go back in for something... I don't know, something that matters to you... And you pass through the main room, and your companion animal is asleep on the floor. Napping. Completely unaware." She held his gaze. "Do you leave it there?"

  The silence was different from the silences before it.

  "That's not ..."

  "It can't consent to being rescued. You'd be making a unilateral decision about its life based on your own values and your own judgment about what's good for it." She kept her voice steady. "Do you leave it there?"

  Thessarn looked at the Umara. At the water source. At the cave art on the eastern wall… partially obscured now by the fall of rock from the upper passage.

  He didn't answer.

  "You wouldn't," Jessica said. Not cruel. Just certain. "Nobody would. Because there's a difference between consent and awareness, and we all know it, and the philosophy only works if you don't think about the animal on the floor."

  "It's not the same," he said. Quieter now.

  "It's not identical," she said. "But it rhymes."

  *  *  *

  He was quiet for a long time after that. Long enough that Jessica thought the conversation was over, and she turned back to watching the Umara, cataloguing their patterns the way she'd been doing for two days, trying to learn at least something of the language before the rescue window came.

  When he spoke again, his voice had changed. Not defeated. Something more complicated than defeated.

  "I was on a pilgrimage," he said.

  Jessica didn't move.

  "When it happened." He was looking at the water source. At the dark ribbon of it moving through the rock. "A Syvari tradition. A journey undertaken at a particular life stage... I don't have a translation that carries the full meaning. It takes you away from your home for between three and six months. You travel. You reflect. You return changed, supposedly."

  A pause. "I was four months in. Further from home than I'd ever been."

  The Umara moved through their patterns. The cave breathed.

  "The asteroid came from the direction of the sun," Thessarn said. "That's the detail I return to. The direction of the sun. No one saw it. It wasn't a failure of technology or attention or preparedness ... it came from precisely the angle that made it invisible until it was hours away. There was nothing to be done." He paused. "My family was home."

  Jessica said nothing. There was nothing to say that wouldn't be smaller than what he'd just put in the room.

  "I was rescued," he said, "before I could get back. Before I could reach them. Before I could..." He stopped. Started again. "I was taken without my consent. Pulled from my pilgrimage by people who decided my life had value worth .preserving. And I never ..." Another stop. Longer. "I never got to be there. I never got to choose to stay. I return to that moment over and over again in the quiet nights… what were their last moments like? Were they scared? Were they calm… Did they want for nothing more than their father’s arms around them?"

  The water ran. The Umara placed stones. Somewhere on the other side of the rockfall, Deke, Maddie, and Vorrin were working to clear the passage.

  "Thessarn," Jessica said.

  He looked at her.

  "I'm sorry," she said. "I'm genuinely sorry."

  He held her gaze for a moment. Something in it that wasn't quite surprised and wasn't quite grateful and was maybe just the look of someone who hadn't been told that in a long time by someone who meant it.

  "The pet argument still stands," she said quietly. "I'm not taking it back. But I'm sorry about your family."

  The corner of his beak moved. Not a smile. Something that acknowledged the existence of smiles.

  "You're an unusual human," he said.

  "So I've been told."

  *  *  *

  They sat together in the cave for another hour and forty minutes before Vorrin broke through.

  In that time, three of the Umara drifted closer ... cautious, incremental, drawn perhaps by the stillness of the two figures near the water or by some quality of their bioluminescence that Jessica was only beginning to read. One stopped within arm's reach of her and regarded her with those luminous eyes, its chest markings moving in a slow, even pulse.

  She didn't move. Didn't reach out.

  It produced a pattern she hadn't seen before ... a single line of light that traveled from its chest outward to the tips of both hands, briefly, then faded.

  She had no idea what it meant. She felt, unreasonably, like she'd been told something important.

  Thessarn watched this without comment.

  When the first section of rubble shifted and Vorrin's light cut through the gap, Jessica stood and brushed the cave dust from her suit. She looked at Thessarn.

  "When this is over," she said. "However it ends. We should finish this conversation."

  He looked at the Umara. At the cave art. At the stone pilings by the water.

  "Perhaps," he said.

  *  *  *

  From the Chronicle of the Last Kindness, as recorded by Maddie:

  Day 51. There was an explosion in the upper passage. Origin unknown, though Vorrin's face when he pulled the seismic data said he had a theory he wasn't sharing yet.

  Jessica and Thessarn were trapped together for just under two hours. She won't tell me everything that was said. She told me about the pilgrimage. About the asteroid coming from the direction of the sun.

  I asked her how she felt about him after.

  She said: the same way I feel about anyone who's been through something that broke them and built the wrong thing out of the pieces. Sad for them. And still disagreeing.

  I think that's the most Jessica thing she's ever said.