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"Populations move."

"Populations don't move in a band that lines up exactly with the ground one man says he walks on an eleven-day rotation."

"That's a large conclusion to hang on a small dataset."

"It's not a conclusion. It's a question, and you're not answering it, which is its own kind of answer." She stepped over the loose plate without being told twice. "How many?"

"I don't count them."

"Varek."

"I don't count them," he said again, and it came out with more in it than he'd meant to put there. "I counted for a while, the first year. And then one night I was sitting in a cave doing math about dead animals like the number was going to get reported to somebody, and I understood what I was doing, and I stopped."

She didn't push.

That was the thing that got him, in the end, and he thought about it for a long time afterward. She had the opening and the leverage and every reason in the world to lean on it, and she looked at the side of his face for a second and let it go instead.

* * *

"Why did you stay?" she asked, a while later.

"I was banished. Staying wasn't the mechanism I'd have chosen."

"That's not what I asked and you know it." There was no heat in it. "You could be anywhere. There's a whole planet out there. There are outer settlements eleven hundred miles from here that would take a surface commander and never ask a single question, and I know that because I've read the settlement census, and half of them are running with no security at all. You could have walked away from the Colony that threw you out and been useful somewhere that actually wanted you."

"You've thought about this."

"I think about everything, it's a character flaw." She kept her eyes on the trail. "Instead, you stayed inside patrol range. You mapped their routes and cleared their Drogs. You showed up in a canyon when they were about to lose somebody. That's not a banishment, Varek. That's a post."

Varek walked about thirty feet without saying anything at all.

The corridor bent and opened, and the northern loop came into view below, wide and flat and clean, exactly where he'd told her it would be.

"There it is," he said.

"Don't do that."

"Do what?"

"Change the subject with terrain."

He stopped walking, and so did she, and behind them the patrol had the good sense to spread out and become extremely interested in their sight lines.

"If I'm guarding a post," Varek said, "then I'm a warrior on duty who hasn't been relieved, and there's a version of the last two years where I've been doing something with them. If I'm a banished man who never left, then I'm something else, and I'd rather not put a word to what."

"Put a word to it anyway."

"No."

"All right." She nodded, and let that one go too. "Then I'll tell you mine, since we're doing this."

"I didn't ask."

"You were about to." She shifted the staff on her back. "My sister's the one who builds things, always has been. She walked into a room full of people who could have eaten her and talked them into an alliance, and that's a real, specific talent, and I don't have it. What I've got is that I don't leave. That's the whole skill set. Marina builds the bridge, and I stand on it, and if you want to burn it you have to come through me. Eventually most people decide it isn't worth the trouble."

"That's a small description of a large thing."

"It's an accurate description of a small thing that happens to be useful." She started walking again. "Everybody kept asking why I stayed on Dobromia when the only family I've got in the universe went to Earth. Nobody ever asked what I'd have done on Earth. I’ve stood in a room while Marina talked, and been the sister with the security clearance."