She pulled the cloak off and folded it, then retrieved her own fake implant from her pocket. She pressed it above her eye with one hand and glanced at the dark window to check the placement.
She caught him watching her do it.
His expression was entirely neutral, which she had learned was not the same as empty. She looked away first.
She was, once again, unremarkable.
She handed him the cloak. He folded it in four precise movements and stored it in a compartment along the wall that she was fairly certain hadn't been there before she looked away. She decided not to ask.
Outside, Trevort's twin suns were high and merciless, and she squinted against the brightness after sixteen hours of pink-lit stone. The dockside streets were mid-morning busy — transport workers, market vendors, the usual population of people who had somewhere to be and were in various states of getting there.
Edi-Veen stepped out beside her.
The implants helped. The civilian clothing helped. His hair and his coloring read as unusual but not impossible on Trevort, which had a population diverse enough to absorb most things. What didn't help, and couldn't be disguised, was his size, his stillness, and the quality of attention he gave his surroundings — the slow comprehensive scan of a person who assessed every room they walked into for threat and exit, automatically, the way other people breathed.
Several people glanced at him. He didn't glance back, which was either better or worse.
"Walk like you have somewhere to be," she said under her breath, "not like you're mapping the area for a tactical strike."
"I do have somewhere to be."
"Walk like it's boring."
A pause. "I am not certain how to do that."
She looked up at him sidelong. He was entirely serious. Something in the honesty of it caught her off guard, and she looked away before whatever expression was trying to happen on her face could happen.
"Stay close and let me lead," she said. "And don't speak unless I speak to you first. Your voice is —" She paused. "Distinctive."
He said nothing, which was, in itself, confirmation.
She set a pace and he matched it exactly, falling into step at her shoulder with a precision that suggested he had done this before too — moved in someone's orbit, protected without appearing to protect. The street absorbed them. Not comfortably, not perfectly, but enough.
They were half a block from the transport rank when he spoke.
"You don't have a real implant."
She kept walking. "We've established that."
"Your body rejects them."
"Also established."
"That is not common."
"No," she agreed. "It's not."
He was quiet for another half block. She could feel him not asking the next question — holding it at the edge of whatever passed for restraint in a Fraluma warrior — and she appreciated the effort enough not to make him ask it.
"I've never been able to explain it," she said. "My father has theories. I've stopped having them."
"What kind of theories?"
"The kind that require a lot of data and a decade of research and still don't produce a satisfying answer." She spotted the transport rank and adjusted her direction. "He works in medical science. He takes it personally."
"What does he research?"
The question was casual. His voice was casual. Nothing in her peripheral awareness of him suggested anything other than casual, and she'd been making her living reading people for three years.
