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"You'd have been miserable."

"I'd have been fine," Athena said. "I'm always fine."

Varek didn't know her well enough yet to know what that sentence meant. He knew enough to hear that it meant something, and he filed it, the way she was always filing things, and they came down onto the northern loop in the sun.

* * *

At the edge of the loop the patrol re-formed, and she came back to him one last time.

"I'm putting the corridor in the route book," she said. "Hot-cycle alternate for the west neck. Everybody in the rotation will be walking it inside a month."

"Good."

"I'm sourcing it."

He looked at her.

"I'm putting your name on it," she said. "Route identified by Varek, exile, surface. It goes in the book, the book gets read by every patrol commander in this Colony, and inside a month there are forty warriors who know the reason they didn't cook in the west neck is a man everyone was told to forget."

"That will cause you problems."

"Probably."

"It will cause you problems with Kaydren in particular."

That got her attention, and he saw it catch. He had a brief and genuinely satisfying moment of being the one holding a piece of information for once.

"What do you know about Kaydren?" she said.

"I know he was a junior gate officer nine years ago, and that he made the whole climb from gate officer to the D'Karr's right hand without ever once landing on the wrong side of anything. That's not luck. Nobody is that lucky. That's a man who knows what's in every room before he walks into it."

"That's my read too."

"Then you already know that a route entry with my name on it is the sort of thing he'll put in a drawer and keep, until the day he needs it."

"Let him." She shouldered her staff. "A thing in a drawer isn't dangerous until somebody opens it, and the day he opens this one, the first question in the room is going to be why a route that saved forty warriors from heatstroke was worth hiding in a drawer."

Varek watched her walk back to her team.

He should have felt worried, and he had the equipment for it; he'd been worried about nearly everything for two years and the reflex was in good working order. What he felt instead, standing in the open on the northern loop with the primary sun climbing and his name about to go into a book inside walls he couldn't enter, took him a while to place.

It turned out to be the feeling of being on a roster.

He flew back to the western ridge and didn't go to his cave. He went to the outcrop with the hollow worn into it and sat there most of the afternoon, and at some point, he realized he had spent two hours planning what he was going to tell her about the southern sector.

The problem was there was nothing to tell her about the southern sector. He hadn't surveyed it. He'd said so himself, that morning, out loud.

He was going to have to survey it.

Varek looked south, across the vent fields toward the acid flats where the Drog density ran triple and sustained observation was a slow way to die of math. For the first time in two years he started planning something that took longer than a single day to finish.

CHAPTER 5

*** ATHENA ***

The route entry went into the book on a Tuesday, and the trouble started on Thursday, which was two days sooner than Athena had budgeted for.

She'd known it was coming. She'd written the entry in the plainest words she could find, because a thing written plainly is a lot harder to twist later than a thing written carefully. It was forty-one words. Boradrith's clerks processed it without comment. The patrol office circulated it inside a day, because the west neck had put two warriors into medical with heat injury the previous summer, and every commander in the rotation had been waiting for somebody to solve the problem.