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She'd expected a lot of things. She'd expected the graceful smile, the one that cost him, the one she'd watched him deploy a hundred times over a year to keep himself from being a burden to a woman who already carried too much.

She had not expected him to just look tired.

"I know," he said.

"You know."

"Athena. I've watched you come back off that ridge four nights running with a face I'd never seen you make before." He shrugged, and there was no performance in it, none of the usual show, just a man at the end of a long night telling the truth. "I made my peace with it somewhere around the second night. It's a decent peace. I've had practice."

"Auren."

"Don't." He said it gently. "Don't apologize to me. If you apologize to me, then I have to pretend there was something to forgive, and there wasn't. You never told me a single lie. You never let me believe a thing that wasn't true. You were the most honest person in every room we were ever in together, and that includes the rooms where honesty cost you, and I would rather have had a year of that than a lifetime of anyone else being kind to me about it." He picked the manifest back up, which was his way of giving them both somewhere to put their hands. "He's a good man, for the record. Under all the surface damage. He was a good man before they threw him out, and being right about that is the reason they can't stand to look at him. You could do a great deal worse than a good man that a coward can't stand to look at."

Athena sat with that for a moment. Outside the room, the Colony was starting its morning, the ordinary sounds of two thousand people who had no idea that anything had shifted in the night.

"You're a good man too," she said. "For the record."

"I know." He almost smiled. "It's my whole problem. Go on. You've got a Colony to hold up, and I've got manifests to pretend to read until I can stand to go to sleep."

She went. At the door she stopped, the way she kept stopping in doorways lately, and looked back at him.

"Thank you," she said. "Not for being gracious. For being honest back."

"Anytime," Auren said, and meant it, and it cost him, and he let it.

* * *

The flare turned out to be a sensor fault, a bad relay cooking in the heat, which she'd half known before she reached the bottom of the ridge. It took her two hours to confirm it and file the report, and she spent all two hours aware of her own mouth and furious at a relay for its timing.

By the time she got back to her quarters it was the deep middle of the night, and there was a message waiting on her tablet, flagged internal, no sender listed, which was itself a small wrong note in a system where everything had a sender.

She opened it.

*The ambassador has been going out through the surface gate at last light. She'd gone alone, eleven times in ninety days, per the transit log. Facing north. Someone thought she should know that this has been noticed, and written down, and kept.*

There was no name on it. There didn't need to be one.

Athena sat on the edge of her bunk in the dark and read it twice, and the warmth she'd carried down off the ridge went cold and hard and useful in her chest, the way it always did when a thing stopped being personal and started being a problem she could work.

Kaydren had a drawer. She'd known that. Varek had told her he had a drawer, on the northern loop, in the sun, a lifetime ago last week.

What she hadn't known, until right now, holding a message with no sender in the middle of the night, was that Kaydren had just done the one thing a man with a drawer should never do.

He'd shown her it was open.

* * *

She did not sleep. She sat up against the cold stone wall of her quarters and thought it through the way she'd think through a breach, from every angle, looking for the shape of what he wanted.

He hadn't sent her the message to frighten her. Kaydren didn't waste moves on feelings. He'd sent it to make her do something, and the something he wanted was for her to panic and stop going to the surface, to cut the thread to Varek herself, cleanly, so that Kaydren never had to spend a single point of his own credibility doing it. He wanted her to solve his problem for him and call it caution.

She thought about Varek on his rock, saving up words for two years.

She thought about the flinch, and the hand coming back anyway.

Then she lay down, finally, an hour before the primary sun came up, and made herself a promise in the plainest words she had, the same way she'd have written it in a report.

She was not going to stop going up to the ridge.