Kamal did not speak much on the way.
Arik appreciated that, though appreciation had a strange shape when it came to Kamal. The man had served Goliath, had survived Goliath, had watched the world forget him and then quietly kept breathing beside the ruins until Arik walked back into his life wearing a different name and a face too young for all the ghosts it carried.
Kamal could have said a thousand things.
He said none of them.
Kamal walked half a step behind him, as if he knew better than to stand beside a man who had not decided whether he was going to a sickroom or a grave.
Outside the door, he stopped.
For a moment, the instinct returned.
No.
It was not fear, exactly. Arik refused to call it that. Fear had a form. It could be measured, understood, and used. This was something worse, something entwined between duty and memory, pity and resentment, between the man he knew himself to be and the man whose grief had seemingly crossed over death with its teeth still bared.
