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Across the cavern, Thessok cleared his throat with tremendous discretion and became extremely interested in the far wall, and did not quite manage to hide that he was grinning.

*** Athena ***

She wrote to Marina that night, and this time she left nothing out.

There had been a letter once, months ago, with a person-shaped hole in it where Varek should have been, a hole she had left on purpose and known her sister would eventually find. There was no hole in this one. She wrote about the ridge, the cave and the arena. She wrote about the man who had saved up two years of words and spent all of them on a rock at the edge of the world. She wrote the sentence she had not been able to write in the autumn, the one about a banished commander who had quietly kept her patrols alive, and then she wrote the new sentence that came after it.

I'm pregnant, she wrote. It's his and mine. You're going to be an aunt to something the universe has never assembled before, and I need you to come home and be unbearable about it in person.

She read it back once. It was the least measured thing she had ever sent through a relay, and she did not cut a word of it. Marina had spent her whole life reading the shape of what Athena didn't say, and for once there was nothing underneath the words that the words weren't already carrying.

She sent it. Then she sat a while with the photograph on the wall, she and Marina on the Vulcana's observation deck, Marina laughing at something outside the frame. She had looked at that photograph a hundred times in a year, and it had never once helped. Tonight it helped. Tonight it was not a picture of what she had lost, but of the person she most wanted to tell.

* * *

In the days before the ship came close enough to matter, Varek began to teach.

It had been Athena's idea, a season ago, said on a ridge to a man who believed no one would ever let him back inside the walls. Forty warriors in a room and you at the front with a terrain model. He had told her then that he was not permitted. He was permitted now.

She came to watch on the second day. The practice cavern had been given over to it, and someone had built a terrain model down the center of the floor, the whole northern and western surface rendered in packed sand and colored stone, the vent fields, the ridge lines and the Drog territories he had carried in his head for two years and never once been able to hand to anyone. He stood at the head of it with a pointer cut from a Drog spine, and he talked. Forty warriors and three of Earth's incoming military liaisons listened as though the floor might open if they looked away.

He was good at it. She had known he would be. He talked about the surface the way he did everything, plainly and without waste, and the knowledge that had been slowly killing him alone out there turned out, in a room full of people who needed it, to be a gift. He caught her in the doorway once and did not stop teaching, but the bond warmed and steadied, the private version of a smile.

Gorvath stood at the back with his arms folded, saying nothing, finding fault with everything and staying for the whole of it. When it ended, he told Varek his left was still slow. It was, Athena had come to understand, the highest praise the old man had in him.

* * *

The mission ship showed on the long-range sensors three days later.

Rodriguez brought the contact up from the communications room at a run, professional composure abandoned somewhere in the corridor behind him. A human vessel, Earth-registered, coming in on the trajectory the relay had promised. Twenty people aboard, the manifest already loading: diplomats, scientists and military liaisons. The Colony had been preparing for the mission for weeks, but a manifest on a screen and a ship on the board were different things. Athena watched the contact blink its slow way inward and understood, in a way the paperwork never had, that Earth was actually coming.

One name on the list she did not know: Diana Montanari, a diplomatic specialist formerly of the Vulcana program.

She filed it. She had learned on Dobromia to notice the details that seemed to sit at the edge of things, because the edge was where they hid before they moved to the center. She did not know yet why the name mattered. She only knew that it did, and that was usually enough to start with.

That evening she stood at the surface gate with Varek, the two of them on the same side of the threshold, watching the sky.

The twin suns were setting. The larger one had gone down, and the smaller one hung above the ridges, white and sharp and dying on a schedule Melessra could now name to within a cycle. As they watched, it flickered. The stutter was brief, barely there, the kind of thing a casual eye would blame on heat-shimmer or tired vision. Athena was not a casual eye. She had read the reports. She knew what the flicker was, what it meant and how little time the number left.

But the flicker passed, the sun steadied and the light went on.

The mission was coming. The alliance was real. Earth was sending its people; the grain was moving and out past the vent fields the settlements were eating on Varek's curve instead of on a rotation of elders going hungry so their children wouldn't see. The second sun did not care about any of it. It would go on dying on its own schedule, indifferent to treaties and bonds and the stubborn work of two species trying to outlast it. But the people cared, the people were coming and that had turned out to matter more than the sun did.

Varek's thumb moved across her knuckles, a small thing and an enormous comfort. Under her other hand, flat against her stomach, was the faint new note, quiet and listening. The bond hummed among the three of them, the deep settled frequency of a thing that was not going to change.

The splinter that had lodged behind her eyes the first time she saw him in a canyon full of dead Drogs was gone. In its place was something warmer, more permanent and stubbornly alive. It was not a splinter at all, but a root.

"The story isn't over," she said.

"No," Varek agreed. "It isn't."

The larger sun's afterglow faded. The smaller one hung alone above the ridges, flickering, dying and still burning, throwing its light across the wastes and the Colony and the two people standing at the threshold between the world that was ending and the world that was only now beginning.

The story was not over. Stories about two worlds learning to share a future were never over. But this part, their part, had found its ending.

And it was happy.

*** Kaydren ***