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It was the only thing in the room that wasn't stone.

Marina's message was waiting on the tablet.

"Second shipment is loaded. Grain, medical, and the seed stock Patel's been threatening people about since November. Peter's running logistics, which means it'll arrive on schedule, correctly labeled, and organized in a way that makes everyone else feel disorganized by comparison. He asked about you. I said you were putting warriors twice your size on their backs and he said 'Of course she is' and went back to his manifest, which from Peter is basically a parade.

Toren misses Dobromia. He won't say so, because he's decided that saying so would be ungrateful, but I can feel it sitting in the back of the bond like a stone in a shoe. He told me last week that Earth's sky is too blue and too empty. I said that was the most alien thing he'd ever said to me and he got genuinely offended, which was worth the whole conversation.

I miss you. I know I say that every time. I'm going to keep saying it every time. Six hours is too long to wait for a voice and a message isn't the same as your face.

Come home for a while. Or let me come there. One of us has to move first and I'm running out of reasons why it shouldn't be me.

Love, M."

Athena read it twice.

Seven months. She still did the arithmetic sometimes, the way you press a bruise.

The bond hadn't been able to take the distance. They'd tested it for two weeks and Toren had stopped sleeping and Marina had started getting headaches that nothing on either planet could touch. After the second week Marina had come to Athena's quarters at some indefensible hour and sat on the end of the bed.

"It's not going to work," Marina had said. "The distance. Toren's pretending it's fine and he's a terrible liar and I can feel him not sleeping."

"Then go."

"That's not the part I came to talk about."

"I know which part you came to talk about." Athena had already known. She'd known for days, the way she always knew things about her sister before Marina said them. "Somebody has to hold this end. It's me. It was always going to be me, and if you ask me out loud, I'm going to say yes, so don't ask me. Let me offer."

Marina had cried. Athena hadn't. That was the division of labor they'd worked out around age nine and neither of them had ever seen a reason to renegotiate it.

Athena had volunteered before anyone could ask. She remembered the exact shape of the moment. Marina had opened her mouth in the council chamber, and Athena had said "I'll stay" before her sister could get a word out. If Marina had asked, Athena would have said yes anyway. This way it was hers.

She'd been proud of that for about three weeks.

She filed the message with the other two hundred and eleven and got to work.

* * *

The afternoon council session ran three hours and accomplished nothing, which was, by recent standards, a good session.

Boradrith sat at the head of the obsidian table with his gold scales gone dull at the edges and his hands flat on the stone in front of him. The D'Karr had two settings that Athena could read reliably; talking and containing. He'd been on containing for most of a month.

"Two weeks," Khrelan said. "The agreement specifies delivery windows. We are two weeks past the window."

"The transport lost primary propulsion outside the belt," Athena replied. "It's repaired. It launched six days ago. Transit is eight."

"So you say."

"So the relay says. You're welcome to read it. It's not encrypted and it's extremely boring."

A ripple of something went around the table that might have been amusement. Khrelan didn't take the bait. He never did, which was the frustrating thing about him; he was the only councillor who argued in good faith, and good faith made him impossible to dismiss.

"My concern is not this shipment," he said. "My concern is that we are rebuilding our food distribution around a single vessel making a single crossing. If that vessel fails permanently, we do not return to where we were. We fall through it. The settlements planted for a supply that will not arrive."

"Which is why the framework includes reserve provisions."

"Provisions are paper. Paper has never fed anyone."

"The reserves are grain, Khrelan. In silos. In the eastern caverns. I walked them last week."