Page 54 of Autumn L.A.W

She made a face, half grimace, half reluctant amusement. “My head does not need a guest redecorator.”

“Exactly.”

She underlined the rule once.

Ezra’s voice stayed soft when he spoke again. “Rule Four.”

She looked up. His eyes were steady on hers, gray as the sea outside.

“Neither of us volunteers to be the sacrifice,” he said. “Not as a first option. Not as a last resort. Not at all. That’s not on the table.”

Sahara’s fingers tightened around the pen. “You can’t just remove ‘last resort’ from the universe by writing it in a notebook.”

“No,” he said. “But we can decide, ahead of time, not to treat it as noble or inevitable. We can decide that the goal is that we both walk off this ship together, under our own power.”

“That’s sentimental,” she said. It came out softer than she intended.

“It’s practical,” he said. “You are a limited resource, Sahara. The League can’t just order another you from a catalog, if this one wears out.”

Her throat tightened. “I don’t usually get compared to office supplies.”

“I’ll work on my metaphors.”

She looked down and wrote, slowly: No self-sacrifice. We both walk off this ship. There. Ink on paper. A promise she hadn’t realized she wanted until he forced her to say it.

She set the pen down. “Anything else? No making deals with sea monsters? No adopting cursed barnacles as pets?”

“I thought those could go without saying. But if you feel tempted to befriend magical marine life, we can revisit.”

She huffed a laugh and closed the notebook. “Four rules. Plus, the original set. That’s enough constraints to make even me happy.”

“It’s not constraints,” he said. “It’s scaffolding.”

“Now you’re really leaning into the metaphors,” she said.

“I’m out of practice,” he said. “My last long voyage involved fewer feelings.”

She took a sip of the coffee. It had cooled to a temperature that couldn’t be used as a chemical weapon. “For the record,” she said, “I’m not going to like it if one of your rules saves my life.”

“I’ll try to be discreet about it,” he said.

They lapsed into a companionable quiet, the kind Sahara seldom got with anyone who wasn’t a book. The ship creaked and hummed around them, slicing forward through water that could cheerfully swallow all of them in a heartbeat.

Ezra tapped the closed notebook lightly. “Thank you,” he said.

“For writing things down? It’s my brand.”

“For agreeing,” he said. “To all of it.”

She shrugged, staring at her cooling coffee. “If we’re going to do this, we might as well do it like adults.”

“I suspect that’s the only way either of us knows how,” he said.

She risked a glance at him. His expression was unreadable in that maddening, calm way, but there was warmth at the edges of it. Something that looked suspiciously like comfort.

“All right,” she said. “We have rules, we have a coffee-like substance, we have a homicidal relic in a box. I think that counts as being officially underway.”

“Then let’s hope the worst thing that happens is bad television,” Ezra said.