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The secured chamber sat three levels down, where the stone ran dark and warm and the rock-moss gave off barely enough light to read a face by. It was not cruel. There was a sleeping pallet with the same hide padding as her own quarters, clean water off the central system, a carved partition, a small table and a single dim fixture. Everything a person needed and nothing a person could use. No relay, no staff and no photograph of her and Marina on the wall.

She sat down against the stone and did the only thing there was to do, which was think.

She was angry, but the anger had already done the thing it did under pressure. It had gone cold and quiet and turned itself into something she could hold like a tool instead of a fire. Kaydren had built this. She could see the whole shape of it now, a season of small, reasonable observations assembled into one morning. The elegance of it was that he had needed a real crisis to spring the trap. A real crisis had obligingly arrived on Earth's own relay. He had not made the convoy stop. He had only been standing in exactly the right place, with exactly the right file, on the morning it did.

Under the cold, under the arithmetic, the hum was humming. Low and warm and stubbornly indifferent to all of it.

She noticed it the way she had noticed it in the cave, a third note underneath her own heartbeat. This time it had a direction, a lean, a pull that ran up and out and north. She did not know how the bond worked. Nobody in this Colony would tell her, because the whole Colony treated it as a story. But she knew it was carrying something, because the something changed. When she thought of Varek on his rock, the warmth steadied. When she thought of the locked door, it went taut and unhappy, and she had the clear, strange sense that the unhappiness was not only hers.

He would feel it. She was suddenly certain of that, sitting on a pallet three levels underground. Whatever this was, it ran both ways. A man who had spent two years reading the smallest change in a hostile world was not going to miss the largest change in the only warm thing that had ever happened to him.

She hoped he would feel it. She hoped he would be furious, because furious was survivable, and she needed him alive and thinking, not grieving on a rock.

"Don't do anything stupid," she said out loud, to a locked stone room and a man half a mile up and a bond nobody would explain to her. "I mean it. I'll get myself out of this. Don't you dare come down here and do something noble and get yourself killed for it."

The hum, which did not take instructions, went warm and taut and northward, and did not answer, and did not need to.

* * *

Auren went to Boradrith at the tenth hour and was still arguing at the twelfth.

He did it the way he did everything, without heat and without threat, laying the case out one careful piece at a time. That detaining the ambassador would reach Earth eventually, no matter how the relay was managed. That the alliance was built on trust, and this was the loudest possible signal of its absence. That a surety you have to imprison is not a surety. It is a confession of weakness dressed as strength. Boradrith heard him out, because Boradrith always heard people out. Then he told him, courteously, that his judgment regarding the ambassador was not one the council could presently rely on, and that the matter was closed.

Auren stood in the corridor outside the private chamber for a while after that, turning it over.

He had spent a year being the reasonable one. The patient one. The courtier who worked the channels and never raised his voice. Every channel he had was now closed, politely, by a frightened king. There was one door left that was not a channel. It was not a reasonable door. It led out through the surface gate and up a ridge, to a man Auren had left alone on the wrong side of a wall for two years and had hated himself for it ever since.

He thought about that man. He thought about the fact that the strongest card left on the whole board was a banished commander with nothing left to lose. The only person who could put that card into play was the one man in the Colony with the standing to walk out the gate, find him, and tell him the truth.

He thought about the face Athena had made coming down off that ridge. The loose, unguarded face he had wanted for a year, and had watched somebody else become the reason for.

Then he went to find his cloak, because it was a long walk to the surface and he did not intend to fly it. He would arrive at human speed, on the ground, at the foot of the ridge, with his hands where they could be seen. Of all the things owed all around, it seemed the smallest and the most necessary.

CHAPTER 10

*** VAREK ***

Varek knew something was wrong a full day before Auren came to tell him what.

The hum did it. He had carried it in his chest since the night in the shelter, low and warm and steady, a thing he checked the way he checked the weather, without deciding to. For a week it had told him a simple story. She was alive and she was somewhere. She was, in some way he had no instrument to measure, thinking of him. Then, on a morning that started like any other, the story changed. The warmth went taut and cold and unhappy, and it stayed that way. No amount of telling himself it was only his own worry leaking into it made it warm back up.

He spent that day on the northern ridge doing a poor imitation of surveying. He was really just sitting in the worn hollow in the stone, watching the surface gate, waiting for a small figure that did not come out of it. By the second day he had stopped pretending. Something had happened to her down there in the dark, and he was on the wrong side of a wall he was not allowed through. The helplessness of it was a taste he had thought he was finished swallowing two years ago.

On the second evening a figure came out of the gate and turned north. It was too large to be her, and it was moving wrong, on foot, on the ground, at a walk. It took him a moment to place the gait, because he had only seen it once, and once was two years and a lifetime ago.

Auren walking on the surface. He was coming to the ridge on foot with his hands where they could be seen.

Varek came down off the outcrop and met him at the bottom, because whatever brought a courtier out of his corridors and onto a killing ground at human speed was not a thing you made him climb for.

"Commander," Auren said.

"I'm not that."

"You're about to be, if I have my way, so I am getting used to the word again." Auren stopped a respectful distance off, breathing harder than he would admit to, the surface dust already grey on his cloak. "She's been taken. Athena is in secured quarters in the lower levels and guarded, on the D'Karr's order. She’s been there three days now."

Varek stood very still.

"Say the rest of it," he said. "All of it. Don't manage me."