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Then it dropped behind the ridge and the sky was empty.

Athena stood at the entrance with her hand still on her staff. The wind pulled at her hair. Without meaning to, she counted the Weredragons on the Colony's roster with amber-gold scales.

The number was zero.

She went inside and ate. She wrote back to Marina and told her fifty-three, and told her about Korvax's two gold stars, and told her nothing at all about the ridge.

Then she pulled up the patrol logs, and read them start to finish, and confirmed what she already knew.

Nobody had been out there.

Athena Livingstone had a filing system for the world, and it had two drawers. One was labeled *not my problem.* The other one was labeled *mine.* In twenty-eight years she had never once managed to leave anything in the first drawer that belonged in the second. Lying in the dark that night, watching the ceiling and seeing bronze wings against a dying sun, she knew exactly which drawer this one went in.

She'd find him.

She just didn't know yet that he'd been watching her for eight months.

CHAPTER 2

*** VAREK ***

The thing about being the most dangerous predator on the surface was that nobody had told the Drogs.

Varek lay flat on the western ridge and watched six of them move through the valley below, and he explained this to them, quietly, because there was nobody else to explain anything to and he'd stopped pretending that bothered him.

"You want to go left," he said. "Left is the acid flats. Lots of prey out there, nobody to argue with, real up-and-comer sort of territory. You'd love it."

The lead Drog drifted right, toward the Colony's sensor line.

"Or that. That works too. That gets you killed by a morning patrol, but you seem committed."

The Drog stopped. Swung its ugly armored head at the wind, thought about it in whatever passed for thinking inside a skull like that, and turned the whole pack left toward the flats.

"There we go," Varek said. "Smart. You're a smart pack. Don't let anyone tell you different."

He'd been doing this for two years, three months, and eleven days. Talking to Drogs and rocks. Talking to the twin suns when they came up, and to the wind, and once, memorably, to a boot that had finally worn through, which he'd delivered a genuine eulogy for because it had been a good boot and had earned one.

He knew what that made him. He'd decided a long time ago not to care, and mostly it had worked, and on the days it didn't work he didn't have anyone to tell about it anyway, so it came out the same.

* * *

The banishment had taken eleven minutes.

He knew that because he'd looked at the water clock when he stood up to speak, and again when the guards walked him out, and eleven minutes was apparently all it took to end a life you'd spent thirty years building. He'd expected it to take longer. Big things should take longer. That was one of the many ways the universe declined to arrange itself for his convenience.

That morning he'd been Commander Varek. Six years running the outer settlement patrols, the only officer who actually stayed inside the settlement walls during a rotation instead of pacing the perimeter and calling it leadership. He'd stood in Kesh Hollow through the third winter of the shortfall and watched four hundred people run out of food slowly, which was worse than running out fast, because slowly gave everyone time to be polite about it.

He'd gone to Boradrith first. Privately. That was the part nobody remembered, later, when the story got told. Three months of work, agricultural tables, a plan to move the capital's surplus without dropping the capital under its own line, checked twice by people who'd wanted him to be wrong. He'd laid it all out on the D'Karr's table like a man who thought good arguments won.

Boradrith heard him out for an hour. Varek gave him that. Then he folded his hands and said the capital's stability was the foundation of everything, and couldn't be risked for the periphery.

The periphery. Twenty-three hundred people, and the king had a word for them, and the word meant the edge of a map.

Varek had thought about that word for two more months. Then he'd stood up at the quarterly review, in front of three settlement delegates and twelve councilors, and called the food policy a monument to cowardice that would be remembered only by the children who starved while the court ate.

Every word of it was true. He'd checked. That was the thing he could never get anyone to understand afterward, including himself on the bad nights. The words weren't the problem. He'd have said them again.

The problem was that he'd said them out loud, in a room, to a man who couldn't fix the thing now without admitting he was exactly what Varek called him. He'd handed Boradrith a choice between his pride and four hundred people, and a frightened king will choose his pride every time, and Varek had known that, and said it anyway, and that was the part Gorvath had put his finger on at the gate.