The next three days passed in fragile silence. Their quarters were too small to allow Nolan and Kit to avoid each other completely, and Nolan made no attempt to. He had no wish to stop seeing her; for him, nothing had changed. Speaking the words aloud had not made him any more sensitive to her presence, or any less, or altered what he felt or what he wanted. His bones still crumbled the first time he saw her every day; his brain momentarily shut down with the shock. But that had been true for days now and was not actually unpleasant. The enforced intimacy was no hardship on him.

Kit kept to her room as long as she could in the mornings, but hunger eventually drove her out. She managed to be civil to Nolan, though hardly warm, and he kept a respectful distance. He didn’t badger her with questions or repeated assurances of his love. He merely repeated to her whatever news he’d been able to guess at on the monitor, told her if the guards had left any message with the breakfast tray, and went back to work on his formulas.

But he felt sorry for her. She clearly felt trapped, desperate, anxious for Chay and wary of her fellow prisoner, and there was nothing she could do about any part of her situation. Midway through the second day, just to offer her a distraction, Nolan suggested they continue reading A Wanderer’s Tale, and she gratefully acquiesced. She didn’t seem up to reciting the text herself, but she sat slumped in the chair, hand supporting her chin, and listened as Nolan read. It pleased him that he could do something for her, even something so small.

When the book palled on both of them, they took up choisin again, Kit playing with far more concentration this time. Two hours passed without either of them saying a word except to request a card or a turn at the dice. Nolan tried to remember some of the strategies Pakt had used, just to make the game a little more exciting, but he still could not get his mind around the tactics, and so Kit won handily.

“Another game?” he asked, but she had risen to her feet.

“I don’t think I could bear it,” she said. “I’m going to bed.”

It was barely past sunset; she couldn’t possibly be tired. But maybe she was one of those people who possessed the knack of retreating into sleep when the world became too much to cope with. He had never had that skill and, until now, had not envied it.

“Tomorrow, then.”

“Oh, I imagine so.”