Page 28

"I want something from you," he said, low.

"What?"

"I want you to keep coming up to this ridge." He said it like a confession, because for him it was one. "I've had two years of nobody, and I'd made my peace with it, or I'd told myself a story about making my peace with it, which turns out to be a different thing. And then you started walking past, and I've been sitting on this rock every night for a week hoping you'd come up, and hating myself for the hoping, because hoping is how the surface finally kills a man. So that's the thing I want from you. It's a selfish thing, and it will cost you more than it costs me, and I'm asking for it anyway, which I'm not proud of."

Athena looked at him in the last of the light.

"That's the most words you've ever said to me in a row," she said.

"I've been saving them up. Two years is a long time to save up words."

And that undid her, somehow, more than a smooth line ever could have. The image of him out here, alone, saving up words for a person who might never come, spending them all at once on a rock at the edge of the world because she'd finally climbed up. She reached over and took his hand, the way she had in the cave, and this time he didn't flinch, and this time she didn't stop there.

She kissed him.

It wasn't smooth. It was two guarded people who had both stopped expecting this, and neither of them was graceful about it, and his hand came up to her face like he wasn't sure the rules allowed it, scaled fingers careful against her jaw. He was warmer than she'd expected. Weredragon body heat, running hotter than a human's, and the warmth of it went through her like something rearranging the furniture of everything she thought she knew, and for a moment on a rock at the top of a dying world there was no Colony and no alliance and no career and no odds, just his hand on her face and the plain astonished fact of the thing.

Then a light flared to the south, low on the horizon, and her whole body went to security officer before her mind caught up.

She pulled back, not from him but from the light.

"Perimeter flare," she said, already reading it. "Southern sensor line. That's a real alert, that's not us." She was on her feet. "I have to go. Varek, I have to go."

"Go." He was up too, and his voice had gone rough, and he wasn't reaching to hold her there, which she would think about later, the fact that even now he wouldn't hold on to something that wanted to leave. "Go. It's your job. Go do it."

She went three steps and turned back.

"This isn't me pulling away," she said. "I want that on the record. I'm not the flinch. I'm not taking it back the second something intrudes. I'm going because there's a flare on my perimeter, and I'll be back up on this ridge the first night I can, and you're going to be sitting on this rock when I am, because we're apparently both exactly this stupid."

Something broke open in his face. It wasn't quite a smile. It was the place a smile comes from, the same look she'd caught in the canyon, except this time he let it get all the way to the surface.

"I'll be on the rock," he said.

She flew, or walked, or half-ran back down the ridge toward the gate with her mouth still warm and her heart going like something trying to get out of her chest, and she understood, with the flat certainty she usually saved for reading a threat board, that she was already well past the point where she could have stopped this if she'd wanted to.

The good news, she thought, taking the slope fast in the dark, was that she didn't want to.

The bad news was going to be everything else.

* * *

She found Auren in the morning, because she owed him a conversation she didn't want to have and had never once let herself skip a thing just because she didn't want it.

He was in the small archive room off the administrative level, the one nobody used, going through trade manifests with the focused attention of a man who had found himself something to do at an hour when he shouldn't have been awake.

"You didn't go to bed," she said.

"Neither did you, from the look of you." He set the manifest down. "There was a flare on the southern line."

"Bad relay. Cooked in the heat. Two hours of my life I'm not getting back." She sat down across from him. "Auren."

"Athena."

"I need to tell you something, and I need you to let me get all the way through it before you're gracious about it, because you're always gracious about it, and it makes it harder, not easier."

Auren folded his hands on the table and waited. He had a gift for waiting. It was one of the things she'd have loved about him, in the version of her life where loving him had been available.

"I went up to the ridge last night," she said. "To see Varek. Not on a patrol. Not for a route. I went up because I wanted to see him, and I kissed him, and I'm going to keep going up there, and I wanted you to hear it from me before you heard it from anyone else, because you asked me to, in this exact room, weeks ago, and you were right to ask."