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"How fortunate," Sillevia said, "that he is so often nearby."

"He lives out there," Athena said. "The council put him out there. Being nearby is the entire condition of his existence."

She regretted it before the sentence had finished leaving her mouth. Not because it wasn't true. Because Sillevia's face did something small and satisfied, the exact look of a fisherman who has just felt the line go tight.

"Of course," Sillevia said, and folded her hands, and said nothing else for the rest of the session, which was worse than anything else she could have chosen to do.

* * *

Auren caught Athena in the corridor afterward.

"Well," he said.

"Don't."

"I'm not going to say anything."

"You're absolutely going to say something."

"I'm going to say one thing, and then I'm going to get you some tea." He fell into step beside her. "You conceded to Khrelan in an open session."

"It was a fair hit."

"It was a fair hit, and you took it standing up in front of the whole council, and Athena, I have been in that room for thirty years, and I have watched exactly two people do that. The other one was Gorvath." He shook his head slowly. "Half that chamber has no idea what to do with you now. It is the single most effective thing you have ever done in there, and you did it by accident."

"I didn't do it by accident. I did it because he was right."

"Yes," Auren said. "That is what I mean."

* * *

She stopped by the research caverns before the northern rotation, because Patel had missed two meals in a row, and Melessra had started sending her increasingly short notes about it through the internal system.

They were arguing when she got there. They were always arguing. Athena had come to understand it as a form of affection so complete that neither of them could have described it as anything else if you'd asked.

"You cannot present a range that wide," Patel was saying, her glasses shoved up into her hair, which meant she'd been at it for hours. "Twelve to fifteen is not a finding. It's a shrug with numbers stapled to it."

"It is the range the data supports," Melessra said.

"It's the range the data supports if you weigh the last four oscillations equally, and you shouldn't, because cycle sixty-one is doing something the other three aren't doing."

"Cycle sixty-one is one cycle."

"Cycle sixty-one is the most recent cycle, which makes it the only one that tells us anything about now." Patel jabbed a finger at the display. "You're averaging away the exact thing we're supposed to care about."

"If I write what you want me to write, the council reads one number and stops reading."

"Then write it so they can't stop reading."

"I am a stellar physicist, not a dramatist."

"On this planet those are the same job," Patel said. "Ask Garcia."

Athena leaned in the doorway. "What's the honest number?"

They both turned to look at her.

"Twelve to fifteen cycles," Melessra said.