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She nodded, slow, once, like she'd set something down on a shelf where she could find it later.

"We're heading back," she said. "You can't come in. I'm guessing you know that."

"It's been explained to me repeatedly, with enthusiasm."

The corner of her mouth moved. It wasn’t a smile. It was the place a smile comes from.

"Then I'll see you out here," she said. "Or I won't." She turned, took three steps, and stopped. "Varek."

It was the first time anyone had said his name out loud in what felt like forever. He hadn't braced for what it would do, and he was grateful she had her back to him, because for a second, he didn't trust his face.

"Thanks for the Drogs," she said.

Then she walked back to her people, and none of them looked at him, which was correct and expected and he'd stopped minding it a year ago. She looked back once, though. Halfway up the rise, over her shoulder for a second and a half. It wasn’t a warm look. It was the look of someone adding a line to a list.

He stood in a canyon full of dead Drogs and watched her go, and the thing he'd spent two years not naming rolled over in his chest and opened one eye.

He flew home and ate his terrible moss. He lay down on the stone under the blue-green light, and for the first time in a very long time he thought about tomorrow instead of just surviving today, and somewhere underneath that, quiet and unwelcome and impossible to talk himself out of, he understood that the planet had finally found something out here that could hurt him.

Her name was Athena, and she'd be back on the northern rotation in two days.

He knew the schedule better than her own team did. For two years that schedule had been the thing he watched to fill the time.

Now it was the thing he'd be counting down to, and he lay in the dark and knew, with the flat certainty of a man reading his own scouting report, that this was going to cost him more than he had.

CHAPTER 3

*** ATHENA ***

Athena made it four steps down the canyon before she started being angry at herself, which was earlier than usual. She could normally go a whole ten minutes.

She wasn't angry at the Drogs. You didn't get angry at Drogs any more than you got angry at weather. She was angry at whoever had routed the patrol through the eastern canyon, and the whoever was her.

It had been the short line between the vents and the northern loop, and the patrol had walked it eleven times in four months without so much as a track in the dust, and she'd let eleven clean runs turn into a fact she could plan around. That was the mistake. Not the terrain, not the Drogs, just a good security officer getting comfortable, which was the one thing a good security officer was never allowed to do. She'd write it in the report exactly like that, because if she made it sound softer, somebody would make the same call in six weeks and lose more than a wing over it.

"Korvath," she said, dropping back down the line. "Stop walking on that wing."

"I am fine, Ambassador."

"Your wing is open from the third strut to the trailing edge, so you are not fine, you are stubborn. Those are different words." She looked at the two warriors flanking him, both of them hovering with their hands half-up like they were ready to catch two hundred pounds of pride the second it went over. "Take his weight."

"You cannot order us," one of them said, not unkindly. "You are the ambassador. You are not in his command line."

"I put your commanding officer on the mat three times yesterday morning."

The warrior considered that, found it fair, and got a shoulder under Korvath's good side.

"That is not how the command structure works," Korvath said, letting him do it anyway.

"It's how it works today."

They came up out of the vent field with the primary sun low behind them and the Colony gate ahead, the old carved pillars catching the last of the light. Athena had thought those pillars were the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen, once, back when everything here was still new enough to be beautiful. Now she mostly checked whether the gate guards were standing where they were supposed to be standing.

They were. She checked anyway. She always checked.

And under all of it, the whole way back, was a man in a canyon with amber-gold scales gone dark from the sun, who had dropped two hundred feet to kill two Drogs for a patrol that wasn't his, and then stood there in the wreckage like he'd expected to be arrested for it.

She told herself she was thinking about him because he was an unidentified asset in her operating area, and cataloguing unidentified assets was the job.