Chapter 68: Inches from her face
They left the cave and headed southeast, and Yuto could not get Maya’s expression out of his head.
That look.
Calm. Settled. Like she had already decided something and was simply waiting for the situation to catch up with her decision. He had seen determination before — in fighters before a bout, in people backed into corners with no remaining options. This was different. It sat quieter. Deeper.
Like she was already prepared to do whatever it took.
He turned the thought over as they walked.
Whatever it took included a range of things. Some of them were fine. Some of them — the ones the book had pointed toward with the word *malevolent* — were not. And Maya had read the same passage he had, and her response had been that look, cold and steady, without a trace of hesitation in it.
Should he start being wary of her?
He considered this seriously, because it deserved to be considered seriously. They barely knew each other. He knew she was capable — he had watched her dismantle a beetle’s armor in four seconds — and he knew she was composed in a way that went beyond training. What he did not know was where her priorities lay when they diverged from his.
She might betray Tami.
She might betray him.
Expecting loyalty from someone he had met days ago in a wasteland that turned rocks into reptiles seemed, when he actually examined the assumption, optimistic to the point of being naive.
He exhaled through his nose.
And yet it bothered him.
Not the possibility itself — that was just realistic. What bothered him was the specific quality of that look. The absence of conflict in it. The sense that she had already done the calculation and arrived somewhere clean on the other side, without any of the friction that the calculation should have produced.
That she could turn on him, if it came to it, without hesitation.
He shook his head.
No.
He was doing that thing where a thought arrived and he followed it somewhere it had not earned yet. Maya had looked at a page in a book and he had read her expression and now he was constructing an entire framework of potential betrayal around a single moment of quiet.
She hadn’t done anything.
It was just a look.
He was overthinking it.
He was still in the process of talking himself down from this when Maya stepped in close beside him.
He froze.
She was right there. Close enough that he was immediately, acutely aware of the proximity — the distance that existed a second ago simply not there anymore. Before he had fully processed this, her palm pressed against his forehead.
His entire body went rigid.
She leaned in slightly, her face only a few inches from his, her eyes focused and intent, completely absorbed in whatever she was checking for.
Behind them, Tami stopped walking mid-step.
The sound Tami made was not quite a gasp and not quite silence. It occupied a specific register somewhere between the two that communicated a significant amount of information about his current internal state.
The two of them exchanged a look over Maya’s head.
Maya, for her part, remained entirely absorbed in the task. She held her palm against his forehead for another moment, her expression unchanged, and then nodded to herself with the quiet satisfaction of someone confirming a hypothesis.
"Your temperature is fine now," she said. "Not too high like before."
Silence.
Yuto blinked.
"...What?"
He stared at her.
"Wait." He processed this. "You just wanted to check my temperature?"
"Yes," Maya said.
She looked between him and Tami, registering their expressions for the first time.
"What’s wrong?"
Yuto exhaled — a sharp, disbelieving sound that was not quite a laugh.
"What do you mean, what’s wrong?" he said. "Do you realize how close you were to me just now?"
Maya paused.
She looked down, slowly, as if reviewing the geometry of where she was standing relative to where she had been standing. The silence that followed had a particular quality — the quality of someone doing arithmetic they had not thought to do at the time.
"Oh," she said.
The faintest color rose along the back of her neck, just above her collar.
She stepped back. Immediately, cleanly, the same way she did everything — without excess. The distance between them returned as quickly as it had gone.
Tami let out a long, slow breath from behind them.
"...Wow," he said.
They continued walking.
Tami, having recovered with the speed of someone who found the situation too interesting to stay stunned for long, fell into step beside Maya and began talking. Something unrelated. Yuto didn’t track the subject. Tami had found a thread and was pulling on it with the energy of a person delighted by the world, and Maya responded in her usual way — short, flat, unbothered — and the conversation continued regardless.
Yuto walked beside them and said nothing.
His mind kept returning to the moment.
The proximity of it. The complete absence of self-consciousness in her. She had pressed her palm to his forehead and leaned in close and her only thought had been his temperature, as if the rest of the situation — the closeness, the angle of her face, all of it — simply hadn’t registered as information requiring a response.
Or maybe it had registered.
Maybe the blush at the back of her neck said something different about that.
He couldn’t tell.
And then, because he was apparently determined to give himself no peace today, his thoughts went somewhere else entirely.
Gina.
He hadn’t thought about her in hours, which itself felt like something to account for. She was still back there — still in the Masaki estate, still under house arrest, still waiting in circumstances he had created by existing in the wrong place at the wrong time. He had left without knowing what would happen to her. Whether the Masaru clan would redirect their attention toward her. Whether house arrest would remain house arrest or become something more permanent and less comfortable.
And here he was.
Walking through ruins.
Fighting creatures that should not exist.
Standing beside another girl who had just pressed her hand to his forehead and made his chest do something inconvenient.
The guilt came in slowly, the way cold does — not all at once, but settling, filling the available space. He hadn’t asked to be here. He hadn’t chosen any of the series of events that led from Teki looking at him to standing in a purple-skied wasteland with a sword and two strangers. But guilt was not interested in what was chosen and what wasn’t.
He lowered his gaze to the path ahead.
The rocky terrain continued southeast, unchanged, indifferent. The violet sky sat above it all without comment.
He walked, and said nothing, and the dark mood settled into him like it intended to stay for a while.
