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*** Kaydren ***

The patrol report reached Kaydren at the eleventh hour, which was later than he liked and exactly as late as the filing rules allowed, so there was nothing to be done about it and no one to be irritated at except the rules.

He read it twice.

The first pass was for the content. Seven Drogs, eastern canyon, one wing injury, no fatalities, charge expenditure within the normal range. A routine contact, competently handled, honestly written. The ambassador's reports were always honestly written. He had checked them against the sensor logs for nine months and had never once caught her shading a number, and he found that more interesting than catching her would have been. A person who never shades a number has decided that being caught would cost her more than the shading could ever earn her, and a person who thinks that way is a person who is playing a longer game than the people around her.

The second pass was for the name.

She had put it in. That was the part worth sitting with. She had written the exile's name into a document that would cross the D'Karr's clerks and the patrol office and, eventually, him, and she had done it knowing exactly what the name was, because she would have asked, and the person she asked would have been Auren.

So either she did not understand what she was holding, which he doubted, or she had put it in the open on purpose, so that anyone who came at her with it later would have to explain why they had waited. That was what he would have done. Kaydren did not enjoy discovering that the ambassador's instincts and his own arrived in the same place. It suggested she would see him coming.

He pulled the surface access log and cross-referenced the last ninety days of gate transits against the patrol rotation. When he finished, he had a list of eleven occasions on which the ambassador had gone out through the surface gate at last light, alone, stood at the threshold for somewhere between ten and thirteen minutes, and come back in. All eleven times, the gate sensors put her facing north.

He noted the times, and then he closed the log, because there was nothing there yet, and a man who moved on nothing spent his credibility before the moment that actually needed it.

He would look again in thirty days.

CHAPTER 4

*** VAREK ***

Varek was not waiting for the patrol.

He established this several times over the course of the morning, with a good deal of firmness, from a basalt shelf on the northern ridge that happened to have a clean line to the Colony's surface gate and about a mile and a half of the northern patrol route. He was surveying. The northern band had three inactive nest sites he hadn't walked since the last thermal cycle, and inactive sites did not stay inactive out of courtesy, and a responsible person checked them.

That he could have surveyed those sites from any of nine other positions, and had picked the one with the view of the gate, was a coincidence he looked at exactly once and then declined to look at again.

There was a worn dip in the stone where he sat. He'd put it there himself, over six months of sitting in this precise spot, and it fit him now the way a chair fits a man who's had it too long, and lately it had started to embarrass him. It was evidence. If anyone ever climbed this ridge, they would find a hollow in the rock shaped like a man, aimed at a door he wasn't allowed through, and they wouldn't need him to explain the rest. Nobody ever climbed this ridge, which was both the comfort and the whole problem with his life at the moment.

The gate opened at first light and the patrol came out in the standard stagger. He counted them off without deciding to. There were four warriors and three humans. The big one with the notched crest on point, two warriors in the middle, and the small human on rear guard who never talked and who Varek had privately filed as the second most dangerous person on the team.

The first most dangerous person was third from the front, on the left flank, and she was not supposed to be there.

The northern rotation this cycle belonged to a junior officer whose walk Varek knew by heart, a young warrior who drifted right on the descents and had to be told about it twice a rotation by whoever was behind him. Athena had bumped him. She had rearranged the schedule to put herself out here, and Varek sat on his ridge and worked through what that meant in about four seconds, and then sat there a good deal longer than four seconds with a feeling in his chest he did not currently have a name he was willing to use for.

Then he looked at where the patrol was heading, and the feeling turned into something he could actually use.

They were routing through the west neck.

* * *

He came down off the ridge and put himself on the trail a hundred and fifty feet in front of them, in the open, with his hands where they could be seen.

He'd thought about this part. A man who dropped out of the sky onto a patrol twice in one week was a man asking to be shot, and while he was fairly sure he could live through a staff blast at that range, getting shot by her team struck him as a poor foundation for whatever this was turning into.

The point man saw him first, and the whole line came up.

"Weapons down," Athena said.

"Ambassador," the point man said.

"That's the exile. Weapons down, stay ready." She came forward through the line without hurrying, and stopped about eight feet off. "Varek."

"Ambassador."

"You're on my trail."