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"That wasn't a gesture. The command ration came out of the settlement's allocation. Eating it would have taken it off somebody's plate."

"Yes. He explained that. Our mother did not care about the reasoning."

Varek walked another twenty feet. "What's your brother's name?"

"Renuth."

"Renuth of Kesh Hollow." He turned it over. "Tall. He wouldn't stop volunteering for the night watch because he'd decided that was where the important work got done."

"That is him."

"Is he well?"

"He’s a section leader in the eastern quarter now. He has three young."

"Good," Varek said, and had to leave it there, and walked on before his voice could do anything he'd regret.

Nobody spoke for a minute. Then, from further back in the line, another warrior said, "The loose plate. You said forty feet."

"About forty feet."

"It was thirty-one."

"Then count better next time and don't step on it."

There was a low sound from the middle of the line that in a Weredragon was as close to a laugh as the situation would allow, and Varek discovered that his chest hurt in a way that had nothing to do with the heat.

* * *

Athena came up on his left about halfway through.

"How much of the surface have you got mapped?" she asked.

"North and west, all of it. East, most of it. South, none."

"Why is south a blank?"

"Because the Drog density south of the acid flats is about triple anything on this side, and surveying it would mean sitting in it for weeks, and sitting in it is a way to die slowly of math."

"How do you record it? The mapping."

"I don't."

She looked over at him. "It's all in your head."

"There's nothing to write on and nothing to write with, and if I made something to write on, I'd have to leave it in a cave where a thermal event could take it while I was out." He shrugged. "So I walk it until it's memorized, and then I walk it again on a rotation so it stays memorized. It isn't efficient. It's what I've got."

"How long is the rotation?"

"Eleven days for north and west. Nine for east."

"You've been running a personal survey rotation for two years."

"It gives the day a shape."

She was quiet for a few steps.

"I've been in the surface archive," she said. "Drog contact along this whole band is down a third over two years. Surface deaths down from thirty-one to twelve, same band, same window, yet nobody's written it up."