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"How are you?" Auren asked.

"I'm fine."

"You've been fine for seven months."

"I'm consistent."

"You're a wall." He said it without heat. "Do you know what you told me the day the transport left? I asked how you were and you said, and I remember this exactly, 'I've got it.' That's not an answer to how are you. That's an answer to can you carry it."

"They're the same question here."

"They are not the same question anywhere."

"You're stuck." He said it gently, which made it worse. "You handle everything and you call the handling 'fine,' and I've watched you do it since the day the transport left, and Athena, I'm going to keep sitting in this ridiculous chair until you say something true."

She looked at him. Gray scales, dark eyes, the whole absurd patient warmth of a man who brought her tea she didn't like every day for a year and never once asked her for anything.

"I'm lonely," she said.

Auren didn't say anything.

"There. That's the true thing." She turned the cup around on the desk. "My sister's on another planet. My parents are dead. There are eleven humans in this Colony and every one of them is my responsibility, which is not the same as being my friend. I run a room full of people who outrank me in a government I'm not a citizen of, and I do it well, and I go back to a stone room at night and there's nobody in it."

"There's me."

"I know." She met his eyes. "Auren. I know."

"That wasn't a bid. I'm not making a bid." He stood, and he was smiling, and the smile cost him something she could see and pretended not to. "Marina asked me to look after you before she left. She said, 'She won't ask. She'll need it anyway.' I told her I'd already worked that out."

"That sounds like Marina."

"It sounds like both of you." He stopped at the door. "Tomorrow I'm bringing the tea again."

"It's terrible tea."

"It is famously terrible tea. That isn't the point of the tea." He smiled. "You don't have to be fine tomorrow either."

He left. The tea was still terrible. She drank all of it.

* * *

Athena went up to the surface at last light because she went up to the surface at last light, and had for three hundred and forty-one days, and would tomorrow.

The primary sun was already down behind the western ridges, leaving the sky rust-brown and heavy. The secondary hung above the horizon, white and hard, and she watched it flicker twice in the space of a minute. Melessra's report had used the phrase "accelerating variance." Patel's version of the same report had used the phrase "we should be talking about this more." Athena had read them both twice and filed them under things she could not fix.

The air was hot and sulfurous and completely, gloriously open. Twelve minutes. That was the deal she made with herself. Twelve minutes of sky and then back down into the beautiful, safe, suffocating dark.

She scanned the ridgeline out of habit.

Something moved.

North, maybe a mile, at the lip of the thermal ridge where the vents cut steam into the dusk. A shape rose off the rock and banked hard against the wind, and Athena's hand was on her staff before her brain finished the identification. Not a Drog. The silhouette was wrong, the wingbeat was wrong, the whole shape of the thing was wrong.

Weredragon.

The evening patrols were back. She'd checked them in herself, all six, forty minutes ago.

The shape turned into the last of the secondary sun's light and for one full second she saw it clearly. Amber-gold, gone dark and matte, like bronze left out in the weather for a long time.