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It was a symbol, and a shrewd one. Athena inclined her head and accepted it, because for once the symbol and the truth were the same shape.

* * *

That evening they stood at the surface gate together, at the threshold where she had spent a year watching him from one side and he had spent two years watching the Colony from the other.

The twin suns were setting. The larger one had already gone down behind the ridges. The smaller one hung white and sharp above them, throwing the long copper light across the wastes she had stopped finding beautiful months ago and was finding beautiful again tonight. The old carved pillars caught the last of it. Somewhere out past the vent fields was a ridge with a hollow worn into the stone in the shape of a man, and neither of them would ever have to sit in it alone again.

She took his hand. He did not flinch this time. He turned his hand over under hers and closed it, the way he had in the cave and on the rock, except that now there was no storm sealing them in and no cover story standing between them and the plain fact of it. They were on the same side of the threshold, both of them, for good.

"I used to stand up here and look for you," she said. "Every night at last light."

"I know. I used to stand out there and look for you." He was quiet a moment. "Two people at the edges of two worlds, pretending the other one was a coincidence."

"We were both terrible at it."

"We were," Varek agreed. "It's the one thing we've ever been bad at together."

"There's a hollow worn into a rock out there," Varek said. "Two years deep, the exact shape of me. I sat in it every night at last light and watched a door I wasn't allowed through."

"I know. I was on the other side of the door."

"You were the door." He looked out at the dark coming down over the wastes. "I'm not going to fill it in. I want it left out there, empty, so I don't forget what the other version of this was."

"That's either very healthy or very grim. I can't tell which."

"Both," Varek said. "That's usually how you know a thing is true."

She leaned into him, and his wing came around her against the evening cold. For a while they said nothing at all.

The smaller sun touched the ridgeline. The light went from copper to a deep, warm red, and the surface began its evening quiet, the Drogs going to ground, the tube worms pulling back into the rock. The bond hummed between them, steady, settled and entirely uninterested in the politics waiting for them both in the morning.

For tonight, she let it be the loudest thing in her chest.

CHAPTER 14

*** ATHENA ***

The nausea started on the fourth morning after the restoration, which was how she knew something was actually wrong, because Athena did not get sick.

She dismissed it at first. The mission preparation was swallowing her days whole. She was eating the way she always ate under pressure, barely and on her feet, and Varek had inherited Auren's old campaign to fix that, which he pursued with a persistence she found equal parts touching and irritating. She told herself it was stress, or bad sleep, or too much relay work and not enough of anything else.

But the nausea kept its schedule. It came in the mornings and left by midday, and the exhaustion underneath it was deeper than any workload could explain. And the bond had changed. It had not weakened or gone strange. It had deepened, developed a new quality she could only describe as listening, as though the connection between her and Varek had grown a third sensitivity tuned to a frequency she could not consciously hear.

On the eighth morning the corridor tilted under her. She put a hand flat on the wall and waited for the world to level, and she admitted the thing she had been declining to admit for four days.

She went to the medical wing.

The healer ran the examination with the meticulous care of someone working at the edge of what the records could tell her, because the records on this were less than a year old. Some of the instruments were calibrated for a physiology that was neither human nor Weredragon but something in between, a compatibility the alliance had discovered rather than designed. The examination took an hour. When it was done, the healer looked at her, and her careful clinical composure softened at the edges.

"You're carrying," she said. "Roughly three weeks along. The indicators are consistent with a healthy hybrid pregnancy. Every case teaches us something new, but so far this one is textbook."

Athena sat on the treatment platform and let the news be as large as it needed to be.

Three weeks set the beginning at the night in the shelter, the night that had been about joy instead of survival, with his wing over the two of them and the hum starting up under everything for the first time. She pressed a hand flat against her stomach, which was unchanged, which gave away nothing of the enormous thing happening beneath it.

She thought of Marina, who would be unbearable about this in the best possible way, the scientist and the sister thrilled in equal measure. She thought of the political weight of it, a bonded pair with a hybrid child standing for the alliance in living form. Then she set both of those down and thought about the actual fact of it, which was a person, three weeks old and the size of nothing, who would have amber-gold scales or freckled skin or some combination the universe had never assembled before.

Under the bond's familiar hum, faint and new, she felt it. It was a third note, barely there, with no voice to it yet, but present and listening.