Rex met her gaze, his eyes steady and unblinking.
"I try to do what I say I will do," he said, his voice carrying the weight of a fundamental law. "When I say yes, the variable is set..."
"When I say yes, it means it."
Iris studied him. Her internal 'read'—that razor-sharp, assassin-class perceptive function—was running at full capacity, scanning the architecture of his presence.
What she found was a glitch in her own mental mapping. It was the specific, unsettling experience of reading a person you thought you had modeled, only to realize the model was missing an entire dimension, a depth, or a darkness you hadn't even known was absent.
"I know," she said, her voice dropping into a contemplative register. "That is the thing about you that I have been trying to understand since the canyon, or perhaps since the first time we met in the village."
She turned her gaze back to the stone path, her profile sharp against the fading light. "Most people's consistency is conditional."
