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"He's got a mapped route network out there," she said. "Thermal corridors, vent timing, Drog migration. Two years of it, continuous. Our patrol commanders are working off survey data that's six months stale, and he's been living inside the real thing."

"I'd imagine he has."

"That's worth more than the entire surface survey program."

"It is."

"And we can't touch it because a man's feelings got hurt in a meeting three years ago."

Auren was quiet for a moment, and when he spoke his voice had become careful, which was the tone he used when he'd decided to say a thing he'd been turning over first.

"Athena. How many questions have you asked me about this man?"

"I don't know. Nine?"

"Fourteen." He stood. "In a year, I have watched you meet maybe two hundred people in this Colony, and I have never once seen you ask fourteen questions about any of them."

"I'm a security professional. Gathering information on an unknown in my operating area is the actual job."

"That's true."

"Then that's the answer."

"It is a true thing that also is not the answer, and you know the difference better than anyone I have met." He said it gently, which was worse than if he'd said it any other way. "I am not warning you off. I have no standing to warn you off, and I would not use it if I had it. I am telling you that Kaydren sits in every room where anything gets decided, and that man has been building a file on you since the spring, and if there is going to be a fourteen-question interest in a banished commander, I would like to hear about it from you before I hear about it from him."

Athena turned around. "There's nothing to hear. I met him for four minutes in a canyon full of dead Drogs."

"All right."

"You don't believe me."

"I believe you completely. You met him for four minutes in a canyon full of dead Drogs." Auren went to the door. "I would just like the record to show that I have also met people in canyons, and I have never once come back and asked fourteen questions about any of them."

He left. She let him have the last word, mostly because he'd earned it and partly because she didn't have a better one.

* * *

She stayed at the desk another hour and got through almost none of the work she'd sat down to do.

Around the second hour she gave up and pulled the surface survey archive instead, and started cross-referencing eighteen months of patrol contact reports against the Drog population estimates. She'd noticed something on the walk back and hadn't had the time to look at it properly.

It took her forty minutes to be sure.

Drog contact along the northern and western approaches was down by about a third over the last two years. Not the eastern approaches, not the southern. North and west, in a band that ran from the ridge country down through the vent fields, and populations didn't just quietly drop by a third in a neat band like that. Populations moved, or something moved them.

She sat in her stone office with the archive glowing in front of her and thought about a man who had told her, with a completely straight face, that the Drogs had happened to be between him and his cave.

She pulled the roster of surface losses for the same window and read down it twice.

It came to twelve deaths, down from thirty-one in the two years before.

Nobody had written it up. Nobody had noticed, because nobody counts the things that don't happen, and a man keeping people alive out of pure stubbornness on the wrong side of a wall doesn't show up in any report ever filed.

She closed the archive. Then she opened her patrol schedule and moved herself onto the northern rotation for the day after next, which was not the rotation she was supposed to be on, and which meant bumping a junior officer who would be thrilled about the extra rest.

She told herself she was doing it because the northern band was where the contact data got strangest, and she wanted to walk it herself.

That one was such a bad lie she didn't even bother finishing it before she turned out the light.