(Rhea POV)

I made eggs for breakfast and burned them.

Not a little burned. Charcoal-edged, smoking, the kind of burned that makes the fire alarm go off if you have a fire alarm, which I don't, because I live in a converted supply building in a rogue compound and my kitchen is a hot plate balanced on a crate.

I scraped the mess onto a plate anyway. Added toast — also overdone, but at least recognizably bread. Poured a cup of milk that I'd bartered for from the farming collective two territories north.

Lily ate every bite.

She sat cross-legged on the bed I'd moved into my quarters three days ago — a real bed, not a cot, with actual sheets that Torren had procured from somewhere he refused to specify. She ate the burned eggs with her hands because the fork I'd given her was adult-sized and her fingers were still bandaged, and she drank the milk in small sips, and when she finished she looked at the empty plate with an expression I was learning to read.

Surprise. That there was more if she wanted it. That nobody was counting.

"You want another piece of toast?"

She nodded. I made one, and this time I watched it like it contained classified intelligence, and it came out golden brown. Small victory. Lily ate it and got butter on her chin and I handed her a napkin and she used it carefully, folding it afterward, and that small precise gesture — the folding — told me more about what her life had been than any of the burns.

Children who fold their napkins have been taught that mess is a punishable offense.

"Lily." I sat on the edge of the bed. "An important person is coming to meet you tomorrow. He's like a — he's in charge of a lot of packs."

"Is he scary?"

I considered this honestly. "He's serious. But I'll be there the whole time, and if you don't want to talk to him, you don't have to."

"Okay." She was quiet for a second. "Is he coming because of Father?"

That stopped me. Five years old and already reading the political landscape. Genetics or survival instinct — probably both.

"Yes. Your father told some people that I took you away from him. The important person is here to figure out what really happened."

"You didn't take me," Lily said. "I came here by myself."

"I know. That's what we'll tell him."

She nodded, satisfied, and went back to picking crumbs off the plate. The morning light came through the small window and caught the dark of her hair, turning it reddish at the edges. My hair used to do that.

After breakfast, I tried to braid it.

I should clarify — I can field-strip a weapon in sixty seconds. I've set broken bones. I once sutured my own arm with a sewing needle and fishing line during a supply run gone wrong. I have braided rope, braided wire, braided the decorative leather wrapping on the compound gate handles.

Hair defeated me.

The problem was that Lily's hair was fine and tangled from weeks of nobody brushing it properly. The problem was also that my hands — hands that could catch a thrown knife without blinking — turned into clumsy, graceless tools the moment they touched something this delicate. Every pass caught a knot. Every knot made Lily wince. Every wince made me want to burn down Silverpine.

After the third attempt produced something that looked less like a braid and more like a rope used to secure cargo, Lily reached back and touched it. Her fingers explored the lumpy, uneven result. Then she looked at me in the small mirror I'd propped against the wall.

She laughed.

Not a big laugh. Not a performance. A real one — quick, startled out of her, the kind of sound a child makes when something is genuinely, helplessly funny. Her eyes crinkled and her shoulders shook and she clapped her hand over her mouth like she wasn't sure she was allowed.

"It looks like a caterpillar," she said through her fingers.

"It does not." It absolutely did. "It's a... tactical braid. For combat situations."

"It's a caterpillar."

I looked at the braid. I looked at her laughing face. Something in my chest cracked — not the violent crack from the medical tent, not the rage-crack. Something slower. Ice giving way under steady pressure. The sound it makes when spring arrives at a frozen lake: not a break but a release.

"Fine. It's a caterpillar. I'll practice."

She left it in all morning.

The afternoon was warm for the season. I took Lily outside for the first time — not far, just the small yard behind my quarters where the supply crates made a natural windbreak. She sat on a blanket and watched the compound with the wide-eyed absorption of someone seeing ordinary life for the first time.

Two wolves crossed the training yard in shifted form. Lily watched them and her face closed.

"Does the thing inside you feel different here?" I asked. Careful. She'd used "the thing" in the medical tent and I'd been using her language since.

"It moves more." She picked at the blanket fringe. "It wants to come out. But I'm not supposed to let it."

"What if I told you there's nothing wrong with it?"

Lily looked at me. Old eyes, old expression. The expression of a child who's been told one thing by every authority figure in her life and is being told the opposite by someone she's known for three weeks.

"Grandmother said—"

"Your grandmother said a lot of stupid things." I said it flat, the way I say facts. Water is wet. The sky is up. Vera Ashford is a liar.