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"You were right," his old training master had said, one hand flat on Varek's chest plate while the guards waited. "And you were useless. And you're going to have a long time to learn those aren't the same thing."

Two years, three months, eleven days of learning it. He still thought he'd been right. He'd just stopped thinking it mattered.

* * *

He ate cave moss, which tasted like warm dirt, and he'd made his peace with that too.

He'd tried everything the first year. Salted it, which got him dirt with a headache in it. Dried it into strips, which got him dirt you could break a tooth on. Roasted it wrapped in Drog hide once, which produced a smell he still thought about, the way you think about a war. The moss did not want to be improved. He'd come to respect that about it. It knew what it was.

His cave was on the western ridge, the eleventh he'd lived in and the best of them. Narrow mouth nothing big could get through. A vent in the back that held the heat overnight. Water that tasted like a mouthful of coins but ran, which was the only quality that counted out here. He'd hauled a colony of glowing rock-moss down from a deeper system a year back, because the dark had started getting to him, and now the ceiling gave off a low blue-green light that made the place look like the bottom of a lake. It wasn't home. He'd stopped using that word. But it was his, and out here that was the whole list.

And then, eight months ago, the patrols got interesting.

* * *

He told himself it was reconnaissance. That was the useful lie, and he was fond of it, and he trotted it out every morning while he climbed to the ridge to watch a Colony that had thrown him out go about its business without him.

The truth was simpler and he only admitted it in the worst hour of the night. The patrols were people. He could hear them from three hundred yards, the way sound bent along the thermal columns, a whole clean sentence and then nothing and then a laugh. He'd learned them like you learn a show you can't stop watching. The one who told the same bad joke every rotation. The two who argued about everything. The big one with the notched crest who walked point and never talked.

And then there was the human.

She'd shown up eight months back, half the size of everyone around her, and he'd noticed her before he'd realized she was human because of the way she moved. The warriors moved well. They were trained, drilled and correct. She moved like there was nothing in her to spare. No shifting her weight, no fidgeting, nothing thrown away. She crossed a field of broken rock the way a person crosses their own kitchen in the dark, sure of every step, thinking about something else.

That wasn't training. That was somebody who'd learned in a place where sloppy got you killed, and had the good sense to remember it.

Her name was Athena. The warriors said it constantly, and he'd caught himself saying it too, once, out loud, to the wind, and had felt so foolish about it that he'd gone and reorganized his entire cave to have something else to do.

He watched her for eight months and never once let himself think the word for what he was doing, because the word was lonely, and lonely was a thing a man out here couldn't afford to say, in case he couldn't stop.

* * *

The patrol walked into the ambush on a morning that had no business going wrong.

Varek was two ridges south when the sound came up the canyon. Staff fire that was fast, then shouting, then the high tearing shriek of a Drog that had taken a blast in the mouth. He was moving before he'd decided anything.

He came over the crest and read it in one look. Seven of them, caught in the neck of the eastern canyon, which was the worst ground on this side of the ridge and they'd walked into it because it was the short way and nothing bad had ever happened there before. That was how the surface got you. It waited until you'd stopped expecting it.

Seven Drogs. Two juveniles, four adults, and an old lead holding the mouth of the canyon, letting the young ones do the dying. Smart animal. Varek would have liked it under other circumstances.

The patrol was still up. Two warriors in combat form working the lead with fire that wasn't doing anything, because a Drog that old had plates you could park a sled on. A third down on one knee with a wing torn open like a busted sail. And out front, ahead of the warrior who was supposed to be shielding her, a small human with a staff in both hands, working a juvenile at close range.

She wasn't swinging wild. She was placing it, every strike into the soft gap behind the foreleg. She was walking the thing backward into the wall to pin it, and she was bleeding from a gash on her arm she clearly hadn't noticed yet.

Varek stopped thinking, which was honestly a relief.

He dropped off the ridge with his wings folded tight and let the fall do the work, and at the last second he snapped them out just enough to turn the drop into a line, and he hit the rear adult claws-first hard enough to crack the canyon floor. He got his jaws into the joint behind its head and twisted until it stopped. Then he was on the second one, fire into the gap where the heat had nowhere to go, and it went down too.

Seven seconds, both of them. He'd counted. It was an old habit.

The canyon went quiet the way a room goes quiet, and every face on the patrol turned to stare at him, and Varek stood there in the sudden silence and realized he hadn't been this close to another living person in longer than he wanted to count.

"Push them," the human said.

Not to him. To her people, without so much as glancing at the strange exile who'd just fallen out of the sky, in a voice flat and easy and pitched to carry.

"They're rattled. Push, now."

They pushed. Ninety seconds later there were seven dead Drogs on the floor and the vents were hissing and everybody was breathing hard, and Varek was standing in the middle of it, which was the last place on the planet he was supposed to be.