Page 136 of The Hyena’s Guardian

Vale closed her eyes briefly. “I am too tired for this conversation.”

Matt looked far too pleased with himself. “Wait until someone explains microwaves.”

Theron narrowed his eyes. “I dislike that word instinctively.”

Theron continued studying the lights as they walked deeper into the building. It unsettled him in ways he struggled to explain. Entire civilizations had once viewed illumination after dark as wealth, status, or protection against death itself.

Now humans flooded entire buildings with artificial daylight without even noticing it.

And there were so many unfamiliar objects.

Security monitors flickered with camera feeds from outside, and someone handed Vale a tablet halfway through the hallway. Theron watched the images shift beneath her fingers but kept walking. There were too many unfamiliar things to stop for all of them.

Matt noticed. “You’ve never seen one.”

Theron studied the moving images carefully. “The glass changed.”

“It’s a tablet.”

“That explanation continues to mean nothing.”

Matt failed completely at hiding the smile this time.

Something warm moved through the bond beneath it. Not amusement alone. Relief.

The realization settled inside Theron as they reached a recovery area near the rear of the safehouse. Matt had spent the entire drive watching him carefully, tracking every reaction, every moment of confusion, every sign that Theron might be overwhelmed by the world waiting outside the mountain.

Matt watched because he genuinely cared whether Theron could handle it, never treating his confusion as ridiculous.

That realization unsettled him more than the trapped lightning glowing overhead.

The room itself was small but quiet. A couch stretched along one wall beside a narrow table covered in medical supplies while rain tapped softly against the windows overlooking the dark valley outside.

Windows.

Theron stopped there too.

Glass stretched from nearly floor to ceiling across the far wall. Beyond it, distant city lights glowed beneath the fading night while headlights moved steadily along roads far below the safehouse.

The world stretched farther than anything he had allowed himself to imagine beneath the mountain.

Matt stepped beside him. “You’ve never seen it like this before.”

Theron shook his head once.

The last true city he remembered had been lit by torchlight and open flame. Everything afterward blurred into isolated decades spent surviving inside the mountain while the world beyond it evolved without him.

Empires had likely risen and vanished while he remained buried underground listening to whispers in the stone.

“I do not recognize any of it,” Theron admitted.

Matt leaned one shoulder against the wall beside him. “Honestly? Most days I barely recognize it either.”

Theron looked toward him.

Matt looked exhausted beneath the harsh safehouse lighting. Bruises darkened portions of his face while healing cuts still crossed his hands and throat from the battle beneath the mountain, and fatigue dragged heavily at the edges of his expression now that adrenaline had finally begun fading.

Theron still found himself checking the bond almost constantly, as though some part of him expected the connection to suddenly vanish again if he stopped paying attention for too long. Every steady pulse of Matt’s heartbeat through the bond grounded him in a way he did not fully know how to explain yet.