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He shifted down to near form and waited to be told to go.

The warriors knew what he was. He could see it move through them, the way the surface scars registered, the matte scales, a Weredragon out here alone. One took half a step back. Exiles weren't people. That was the whole design of the thing. You could take help from an exile the way you'd take help from a lucky wind, and then go home and never mention it.

The human woman walked straight at him.

She still had the staff, and she hadn't lowered it and hadn't raised it, which told him she'd decided he probably wasn't a threat and hadn't fully committed to being wrong. Blood was running off her fingertips. She still hadn't noticed.

"Who are you?" she said.

"Nobody."

"Nobody just dropped two hundred feet and killed two Drogs in seven seconds." She stopped four feet off. "Try again."

"My name's Varek."

He watched it hit the warriors behind her. The shift of weight, the quick look traded between the two who'd been in combat form. They knew the name. Everyone in the Colony over the age of twenty knew the name.

She didn't so much as blink.

And that was the moment he was in trouble, though it took him a few weeks to admit it. She didn't know him. No file, no whispered story, no warning wrapped around his name before she heard it. She was standing there building him from scratch out of what was in front of her, and she was fast about it, and he had the sudden mad urge to be worth the trouble of it.

"Athena Livingstone," she said. "Ambassador and security liaison. You saved my patrol. I want to know why."

"The Drogs were between me and my cave. You were in the way."

She looked at him a long moment.

"Your cave's northwest," she said. "You came off the south ridge. That's the wrong direction for a man headed home."

He said nothing, because everything he could have said was worse.

"How long have you known where I live?" he asked, finally.

"Four months, give or take."

"And you didn't report it."

"You've been steering Drog packs away from our sensor line for months. That's not a threat, that's unpaid labor." She glanced down, seemed mildly surprised to find her own arm bleeding, and wiped it on her leg like it had inconvenienced her. "I filed you under unexplained asset."

"Unexplained asset," he repeated.

"Don't let it go to your head. Same systems got a folder called potential liability, and you're not out of it."

"That's still the nicest thing anyone's said to me in two years."

"Then I'm sorry about your two years."

Something crossed her face when she said it. Not pity. He'd have flown off the ridge from pity. It was closer to recognition, the look of somebody who'd stood in a cold place herself and knew the temperature, and it got past his guard before he could do anything about it.

"You're an exile," she said.

"Yes."

"For what?"

"I told the D'Karr the truth about his food policy in front of his whole council. He didn't care for my tone."