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At six hours and forty minutes, the perimeter sensors caught movement in the northern approach, and the board flipped to seven inbound.

Auren put his hand flat on the wall and left it there for a moment.

They came through the gate dusty and scorched and walking. Korvath first, wing bound and furious about the binding. Then two more warriors, then Chen with her hand wrapped, then the others.

Athena was last, because she always came in last.

Her forearms were dressed in field wrap, her hair was full of grit, and there was a mark on her jaw where something had come off the wind and caught her.

"Seven," she said, before he could ask.

"I can count."

"I know you can count. I'm saying it anyway." She stopped in front of him. "Auren, we'd have lost four sets of wings and probably two people out there. He came into it. He knew where we were from the recall whistle, and he came into a superstorm to get us to a shelter that he built for himself."

"He built a shelter."

"He built four."

Auren looked at her.

He had known her for a year. He had watched her come in from ninety-odd rotations, and he knew the whole catalogue of her faces, all six of them, and he had privately believed he'd seen every version there was to see.

This was a new one.

It was not a large thing. She was filthy and burned and running on nothing, and she was standing in the gate hall talking about shelters. There was something loose in her face that had been strapped down tight since the transport left for Earth seven months ago.

He had wanted to see that face for a year. He had wanted it plainly and without complication.

He simply had not pictured that somebody else was going to be the reason for it.

"Medical," Auren said. "Now, and not in a minute."

"They're second-degree."

"They're second-degree, and you're an ambassador and not a martyr. I am going to walk you there personally, because I've had six hours to work out exactly what I would do if you came back through that gate, and I would like to do at least one of the things on the list."

Something in her expression shifted. "Six hours."

"Six hours and eleven minutes. I counted them. I would appreciate it staying between us."

"It'll stay between us."

She let him walk her to medical. She talked the whole way about Drog shift rotations and shelter networks and a man on a rock, and Auren listened to every word and asked the right questions in the right places, because he was good at this, and because she needed somebody to talk to. He had decided a long time ago what kind of man he was going to be regarding her.

It cost what it cost.

He walked back to the gate afterward and stood in front of the empty recall board for a while, and that was when he noticed the access log terminal beside it had been left active, which never happened. Gate staff close their sessions at shift change without exception.

Auren looked at the screen.

Somebody had pulled the surface transit records for the last ninety days and sorted them by individual. The query was still open on the results. Athena Livingstone, eleven gate transits at last light, direction of gaze logged as north on all eleven of them.

The session had been opened at the fourth hour and never closed, which meant whoever ran it had either been interrupted, or had wanted it found.

With Kaydren, those were rarely two different things.

Auren closed the session himself, which he was not authorized to do, and went to find her. It was the first night in a year that he did not go to bed at all.