She woke at a hundred and forty paces with her hands in the grit and her horns already up.
I know that because I was watching them. They had come up sometime in the night, two blunt dark curves pushing out through the hairline, and they had not gone back down the way they always do, and I had been sitting there for three hours failing to decide whether to tell anyone.
Her eyes opened and found the roof of the cavern and then found me.
"…Cade."
'Oh, thank every god there is.'
I had eleven days of things saved up to say to her and what came out was:
"You look terrible."
Ilse lay there and breathed for a while.
"You are crying."
"It's the heat."
"It is a hundred and forty paces away."
"It's a very strong heat."
She closed her eyes and something happened at the corner of her mouth that I am going to call a smile because nobody can stop me.
Then she tried to sit up, and got halfway, and made a sound.
