Ground Down

Chapter 88

"Because we don't have the resources to do that right now, it takes a lot of electricity to communicate across such a huge distance, more than one entire generator's worth, and as you can see from this-" Clarke stabbed one finger that overbent at the highest joint into one of her papers spread out across the table as if a healthy gust of wind had gone through them- "we're dividing a generator between powering medical and powering the pumps that maintain air circulation inside Arkadia's central parts, we don't have anything to spare!"

Lijai nodded to that from where she stood between Corali leaning on the short end of the table and Enesi trying to burn holes through the window by persistently glaring at it instead of the table. She hadn't dignified the papers with as much as a glance since demanding hands and preying eyes had scattered them like a badly maintained tablecloth. Whenever Clarke stopped speaking, silence hung in the war chamber like that interval between a shot having fallen and trained ears half waiting for the next, half searching the threat, waiting for confirmation of whether the fired weapon would prove automatic or not. That interval warriors used to classify a threat, and Clarke did not let it get to her. 

Lexa clasped her hands behind her back, half taking in Clarke's blonde waves that had her heart skipping every second beat because they still smelled of Polis' handmade soap a little if she only stepped closed enough and because they had been brushed with her brush by her hands with Clarke sitting between her knees telling her she would need to borrow a pair of pants after what Lexa had done to hers and having that image to vividly in her mind made it hard to keep her face together in a way appropriate for her position; and half angled to glare past Clarke at Rys taking in the papers in front of him without much of anything readable on his posture. 

He really just stood there with his head inclined downwards. Probably because he would not be taking a single step closer to Clarke or say a wrong thing to her or look at her in a wrong way. Nobody in the room would. Not on her watch. The guards on either side of Lexa had picked up on that, that she faced the Azgeda ambassador more than the empty Boudalan spot on her other side, but she allowed that. She tilted her head the tiniest bits, following the curve of Clarke's belly with her eyes. 

"But you could?" Corali dismissed Tam practically folding herself all the way over the table to reach for the paper in front of Corali with a permissive nod, kept her focus on Clarke pulling her eyebrows together so hard it created an adorably dark crease above the bridge of her nose. "If you had the resources, you could and would communicate with the Splita?" 

Three of four heads of unit in between Tam and Corali did decidedly not appreciate that Tam flattened her entire upper body out right under their noses trying to get that page, Floukru excluded who just leaned back a hardly bothered bit so Tam wouldn't crumple the page Sevtion was apparently reading. The table creaked. Tam came back up with an exerted huff. Instead of asking. Yuljeda. Lexa took a breath into scanning the scars decorating Tam's warm golden skin. 

Much like Azgeda, Yuljeda wore their scars as an expression of their unit, except that they did not inflict them deliberately upon each other but gained them by surviving the giant hostile wildlife native to their territory. 

The most seasoned Yuljeda warriors knew how to take on a beast three times their size and four times their speed and had survived such encounters, which also meant there weren't a great many of the most seasoned Yuljeda warriors. And all those that existed would unanimously advise you to run at the sight of such a beast, and Lexa had learnt to appreciate them for that. Less so for their approach to the world around them, Tam let her lips squeak skimming through the paper Corali had had before her and popped them right after, standing in a political meeting be damned. Nature did have a humbling quality, but it seemed to come together with a laissez-faire approach to life that Lexa could not quite marry with the requirements of the world around her.