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"I'm always thinking. It's a character flaw. You've been briefed."

"You're thinking about the hum."

Athena went still. "You felt it."

"I felt it." His calloused hand moved slowly and carefully along her arm. "I've never felt it before, and I've had two hundred years to feel it in, so whatever it is, it's you. It didn't exist until you were in the room."

"I think I know what it is, and you're not going to like where I learned it." She turned the thought over and decided to give him the whole story, because they'd made a rule about saying the true one out loud first. "My sister felt it, the same way, and couldn't explain it, and wrote it down anyway because that's Marina. It's the bond. The claiming bond. It's the thing the whole Colony treats as a bedtime story and your field manuals don't have a category for."

Varek was quiet for a moment. "Those are the exact words I'd use for the Drog behavior. A thing the Colony treats as a story that the manuals have no category for."

"I noticed that too."

"Of course you did. You notice everything." She felt the almost-smile move through his chest more than she saw it. "It's a character flaw. I've been briefed."

She laughed, and he held her while it moved through her, and for a while neither of them said anything. The rock-moss pulsed its slow underwater light against the stone. It was, she thought, the first time in a year that being still had not felt like waiting for the next problem to arrive.

The next problem was coming. She knew that the way she knew the sun would rise. There was a message back in her quarters with no sender on it, and a man with a drawer she'd forced into the light. There was a D'Karr who wanted coordinates she did not have, and a whole court still deciding what to do with a woman it could no longer entirely predict. All of it was down there in the dark, waiting for morning, and none of it had gone anywhere.

But the hum was here, low and warm and new, and it did not care in the slightest about any of the rest of it. For one night she let it be the loudest thing in her chest.

"I have to go back down before first light," she said, eventually. "Before the gate change."

"I know."

"This isn't the flinch. I want that on the record again. I'm going down because there's a Colony that falls over without me holding it up, not because I'm taking anything back."

"I know that too." His arm tightened, briefly, and then made itself loosen — the same discipline she'd watched him use on the ridge, the refusal to hold on to a thing that had somewhere else it needed to be. "Go when you have to. I'll be on the rock."

"You'll be on the rock."

"I've got two years of practice at being on the rock. The only thing that's changed is what I'm watching for."

She stayed until the sky through the crack in the stone went from black to the first hard grey. Then she dressed in the blue-green light, and he walked her to the edge of the shelter and no farther, because no farther was as far as the world currently let him come. She went down the ridge in the cold, the hum still humming quietly under everything. She was already doing the math on what it would cost her, and already certain; in the flat way she was certain about threat boards, that it would be worth every bit of it.

Down in the Colony, three levels below the surface, a relay light was blinking on a terminal that had been dark for eleven days. The message it carried had come in under Earth's diplomatic seal at the fourth hour of the night, and it was going to change the shape of everything by noon.

She did not know that yet. For one more hour, walking down a ridge in the dark with her mouth still warm, she got to not know it.

CHAPTER 9

*** ATHENA ***

The message from Earth reached Boradrith before it reached her. That told her most of what she needed to know about the shape of the day before the day had properly started.

She found out because Auren found out, and Auren always found out. He was waiting outside her quarters at the sixth hour with two cups of tea and a face she did not like at all. It was one of the six. It was the one that meant somebody was about to bleed, except this time it was pointed at her.

"The relay came in under Earth's seal in the night," he said, and handed her a cup she did not drink from. "It went to the D'Karr's clerks first, which is procedure. It should have come to you by now, which it didn’t. So, I read it over a clerk's shoulder before anyone thought to tell me not to."

"Tell me."

"Two things, and the order matters." He walked with her toward the administrative level, low and fast. "The first is that the ratification is still moving. That's the good news, it's real, and I want you to hold on to it, because you're about to stop being able to feel it. The second is that the next supply convoy has been put on hold. Some Earth committee has a member who has decided that shipping a planet's worth of grain across the stars to aliens is a thing worth slowing down to make a speech about. There's no new departure date. The message uses the word indefinite."

Athena stopped walking.

She did the math without wanting to, the way she did all the math. The last convoy had landed eleven weeks ago. The settlements were off half rations on the strength of Varek's curve running on Marina's ships, and the whole arrangement balanced on the ships arriving when they said they would. If the ships stopped, the curve stopped, and the settlements went back to elders eating on a rotation so their children would not notice.

"And Melessra's number," she said. "The twelve cycles. When did that reach Boradrith?"