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Memories flashed behind her eyes in painful starbursts. She remembered the anger that had blazed through her after her father’s death, the way Dira and Kel had lashed at each other night after night.

Savita ruffled her wings and lifted her head. Coup shifted toward Kel as Savita rose to her feet. Copper flames flickered along her back as she scraped her talons twice against the ground. A moment later, she catapulted into the air, stirring a dust storm.

Kel and Coup coughed. Savita’s heat lingered, thickening the air into hot syrup and tangling with the strange, sudden tension of their confessions.

Kel rolled up her sleeves and Coup removed his jacket, placing it on the dirt to Kel’s left.

Kel didn’t know where Sav’s heat ended and Coup’s own furnace-like warmth began.

His dark shirt bunched around his shoulders, tanned arms lined with lean muscles.

Kel shook her head as Coup’s gaze drifted to her lap. “What’s this?”

She slammed her notebook shut. “Nothing, it’s—”

Coup wrestled the book from her lap, his heat making her flush almost as much as Savita’s. She tried to stave off his attack with little success, managing to swat at his ear before he skipped out of reach, flipping through her inked pages.

A minute later, his laughter filled the enclosure. “ Twenty pages? You wrote twenty pages on how Cristo has to care for Savita?”

Kel launched to her feet and snatched back the notebook. “ Eighteen pages. I just wrote some ideas for Savita’s training.”

“More like demands ,” Coup scoffed. “Why am I surprised that you assume you know more about phoenix care than a billionaire philanthropist who’s rehoused dozens of phoenixes?”

“Leave, then, if you’re just going to mock me,” she growled. She still had plenty of thoughts to pen. Most of them about the infuriating Warren Coupers.

Savita screeched overhead, her silhouette glowing among the trees.

Coup merely sat to Kel’s left, head tilted toward Savita’s glowing figure. After a few minutes she reopened the notebook and continued writing, trying to ignore his warm presence beside her.

Kel eyed him occasionally, wondering why he was still here. They sat in silence for a while. Shockingly, it wasn’t as unpleasant as she’d expected.

Eventually, Kel’s list of demands turned to scribbles of Savita, soaring across her hastily sketched new enclosure. Kel ran her nails over the paper and imagined her sketch coming to life, imagined feeling Savita’s flames beneath her ungloved fingers for the first time.

As Kel flipped to a new page, Coup leaned over and said, “You forgot to draw her collar.”

Kel’s hand stilled. “Oh. Right.”

Sleep finally starting to slow her fingers, she hastily added a narrow halo around Savita’s neck.

Kel’s father’s death had made it clear to her that phoenixes needed to be collared, for theirs and others’ safety.

It kept people from being burned, mauled, eaten, and it helped phoenixes to build homes, free of chronic destruction.

And yet, something about the forgotten addition of the sketched collar made Kel’s stomach knot.

After a few minutes of silence, Kel asked, “Do you ever think about what it’d be like if phoenixes weren’t collared?”

“We’d probably all die. But it’s our own fault, isn’t it?” He shrugged. “Maybe if we’d never started collaring them in the first place, we’d have figured out a way to coexist. But it’s too late for that.”

Unease slithered through Kel, making her toes curl. She’d expected Coup to disagree, to say it was misguided to even consider that world. That his income counted on phoenixes remaining collared—controlled.

But then again, so did hers.

Behind closed, heavy lids, Kel tried to imagine Savita in the wild. If Savita was truly free, uncollared, would she be happier? Would she fly off, never to be seen again?

Kel shook her head, trying to hack the thought from her mind like a stubborn weed.

“Maybe if we’d never collared phoenixes, we could’ve learned from them, like Ryker did,” Coup mused softly, as if speaking to her through his own daydream. “Maybe they could have even taught us to grow our own wings.”

Kel shifted onto the dirt and leaned her head against the log. “Then I suppose we wouldn’t need phoenixes to race.”

Coup laughed softly. Kel turned toward him. In the dim, overhead light, his chestnut curls had turned to shadows, his amber eyes like cooling embers.

As silence drifted between them, Kel felt herself stiffening, from both the cold and the strange, unexpected truce she found between herself and Coup. She fidgeted with a corner in the notebook, biting down on her lip when a papercut sliced the tip of her middle finger.

“You all right?” Coup asked. When she didn’t reply, he tsk ed. “Careless, tamer. How do you survive seventeen years owning a phoenix and still manage something as thoughtless as a papercut?”

“Says the rider careless enough that he’d rather burn himself alive than lose a race,” Kel replied, sharper than she’d intended.

Whether it was caused by the darkness or the papercut, she felt a strange, sudden vulnerability. She needed him to leave .

Coup stood. “It’s only careless if it’s not intentional. At least I’m willing to do what it takes to get where I need to be. At least I don’t have to lie to myself about any of it.”

Coup left the aviary before she could retort, leaving her to the quiet dark, punctured only by Savita’s glowing silhouette.