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"Periphery. “he replied

"Four hundred and eleven people in that one settlement alone."

"Twenty-three hundred in total of the settlements." He looked up at her. "It's a word for the edge of a map. He wasn't being cruel. That's the part I could never get past. He was being careful, and careful is what he's been for thirty years. Careful works right up until the exact moment it turns into math."

* * *

"Two months later I stood up at the quarterly review," he said. "Three settlement delegates were in the room. One of them was from Kesh Hollow. He'd traveled six days on the ground to ask for a ration adjustment he already knew he wasn't going to get, because that was the process, and going through the process was the only thing he had left to give his people."

"And you looked at him."

"I looked at him, and then I looked at the D'Karr, and I said it." Varek shook his head slowly. "I want to be accurate with you about this, because I've had a great deal of time to be accurate about it. I didn't lose my temper. It wasn't a moment. I'd been deciding for two months, and I stood up and said it on purpose, and I would say it again tomorrow."

"Then what's the part you'd change?"

He looked at her sharply, because it was exactly the right question, and nobody had ever thought to ask it.

"The room," he said. "I'd say it to him alone, and I'd say it in a way that let him fix the thing and keep his feet under him. He could survive being wrong about grain. He couldn't survive being called a coward in front of the settlements and then turning out to be right, because after that, fixing it isn't a course correction. It's a confession." He turned the chip over again. "I made it impossible for him to do the one thing I actually wanted him to do. I was right, and I was useless. Gorvath said that to me at the gate on the way out, and I haven't been able to find the flaw in it in two years of looking."

"That's a hell of a thing to carry around."

"It's the only thing I've got to carry."

The wind screamed against the rock. The blue-green light pulsed against the stone.

"The alliance fixed it," Varek said. "You know that, I assume."

"I know."

"The grain comes in on your sister's ships now, and it goes back out under a distribution schedule that is, to within about four percent, the curve in my plan. I've watched the transports come down. I know the schedule better than the men flying it do." He was looking at the wall now, not at her. "Kesh Hollow came off half rations eleven months ago. Sevriss is alive. I got that from a settlement runner who had no idea who he was talking to."

"Varek."

"Everything I was banished for proposing is running as policy right now. It works. It was always going to work." His voice didn't change at all, which was somehow the worst part of it. "And there's no version of the story where I did it, because a policy delivered by humans and a policy proposed by an exile are not the same policy. The Colony has arranged the history the only way the Colony can hold it."

Athena reached over and put her hand on his.

He flinched.

It wasn't pain, and it wasn't refusal. It was that nobody had touched him in two years, three months, and some number of days he'd stopped keeping, and his body had filed the entire category under things that no longer happen to me, and it took a full second for the filing to update itself.

She didn't pull her hand back. She waited.

Then his hand turned over under hers and closed around it. Varek sat in a cave on the surface of a planet that had been trying to kill him since the day it got hold of him, and held on to a human woman's hand while a storm took the world apart nine feet away. For the length of that grip he was not, for once, alone out here.

Neither of them said anything.

Across the chamber, four Weredragon warriors and two humans went on having their eyes shut with tremendous conviction.

Chen, who was actually asleep, snored once, which broke it, and Athena made a sound that was almost a laugh and did not let go of his hand.

***Auren***

At the Colony gate, Auren watched the storm die.

It went the way they all went, all at once, the wind dropping out from under itself in the space of a single minute, the grit settling, the sky going from brown-black back to an ordinary evening rust like nothing at all had happened out there.

The recall board had been showing seven overdue for six hours and eleven minutes. He knew that, because he had been standing in front of it for six hours and eleven minutes, and had turned down two separate offers of a chair.