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"You're on my ridge, but I'll give you the point on the trail." He tipped his head northwest, toward the west neck. "You're routing through the west passage."

"That's the standard northern line."

"It's the standard northern line, and today it will cook your humans." He watched her file the word cook the way she filed everything, somewhere she could reach it later. "The vents at the throat came up on a short cycle about nine days ago. In the middle of the day, that passage runs a hundred and thirty degrees, and there's no crosswind through it because the walls are too close together to let one in."

"A hundred and thirty."

"Give or take. We can take that for maybe twenty minutes. Your people are in it for eleven, and it's nine hundred feet of it with no shade anywhere."

Athena looked at him a moment. "How do you know it came up nine days ago?"

"Because eight days ago it wasn't there, and I walk that passage."

"You walk a nine-hundred-foot oven."

"Not in the middle of the day. That would be idiotic, and I have limited company out here, so I try not to embarrass myself in front of it." He almost said something else and didn't. "There's a parallel corridor about four hundred feet east. It runs longer, maybe thirty minutes added, but it stays under a hundred because the wall geometry vents crosswise. It comes out above your northern loop with clear sight lines in three directions."

"And you mapped it."

"Six months ago. I watched a patrol nearly go down in the west neck in high summer, and I went and found something better, in case it happened again."

"You found an alternate route for patrols you're not part of, from a Colony that threw you out, and then you sat on it for six months."

"There was nobody to give it to."

That landed somewhere, and he watched it land, and she didn't say anything about it, which he was more grateful for than he'd have been if she'd said something kind.

She turned to her team. "We're taking his route. Standard spacing, weapons ready. If any part of this goes wrong, shoot him."

"That seems excessive," Varek said.

"That's the deal. Take it or walk home through the oven."

"I'll take the deal."

* * *

He led them east and then north along the corridor, and for the first twenty minutes nobody said a word, and it was the strangest twenty minutes of his life in a while.

It was good ground and he knew it in his body, where the footing turned bad and where the vent spray came across the trail, and he found himself calling those things back over his shoulder before he'd decided to, in the old flat call-and-answer of a patrol under a competent officer.

"Loose plate on the left in about forty feet. It looks solid. It isn't."

"Copy," the point man said behind him.

"Spray comes across here at the top of the cycle. If you hear the pitch drop, stop and let it go by. It's about nine seconds."

"Copy."

He hadn't given an instruction to another living person in two years, and here it was coming out of him in the old rhythm, pulled out of storage by his body without asking him first. He knew he was enjoying it. He knew it would hurt later, when the corridor ended and they went back through a gate he couldn't follow them through. He kept doing it anyway, because a man takes the warmth where he finds it and pays for it after.

Then the point man spoke, off the rhythm.

"Commander."

Varek didn't stop walking, because if he stopped, he was going to have to have a reaction, and he was not prepared to have one in front of seven people. "I'm not that anymore."

"You ran my brother's rotation at Kesh Hollow during the second winter of the shortfall." The point man kept his voice perfectly level, the way warriors keep their voices level when the other option is worse. "He was nineteen. He came home and told our mother the officer had eaten what the settlement ate for eleven days and turned down the command ration twice, in front of witnesses."