"This afternoon. I'll need to go alone."
A pause. "You will not be going anywhere alone."
"You can't come into the press archives. You'll be noticed."
"I will wait outside."
"That's —" She started to argue and then stopped, because she had the sudden image of him standing motionless outside the press building for three hours while her colleagues walked past and filed incident reports. "Fine. You wait outside. But you wait inconspicuously."
"I understand the concept."
"Understanding it and executing it are different things. We established that last night."
Something shifted very briefly at the corner of his mouth. "I will endeavor," he said, "to execute it."
She looked at him for a moment. He was looking back at her with that steady blue-green gaze, and there was something in it — not quite amusement, not quite warmth, but something in the neighborhood of both that hadn't been there two days ago.
She turned back to her screen before she could decide what to do with it.
Three days. She had three days, a thread she hadn't finished pulling, and a Fraluma warrior who was slowly, carefully, and entirely against his own better judgment starting to trust her.
She intended to be worthy of it.
Chapter Nine
Dremma
Dremma went to Sraaak the way she always went to difficult things — early, before the rest of the Collective had fully woken, in the narrow hours when the bioluminescent panels were at their dimmest and the city beneath the ocean breathed slowly and the sound of the water through the rock walls was the only noise worth hearing.
Sraaak was already awake. She was always already awake. In forty years of sitting on the council together, Dremma had never once arrived at Sraaak's chamber to find her asleep, and had long since stopped wondering whether the woman slept at all or had simply decided at some point that sleep was an indulgence the position didn't allow.
She was at her writing table, stylus in hand, not writing. That was how Dremma knew she'd been expected.
"Sit down," Sraaak said, without turning.
Dremma sat. The chair across from the writing table was low and plain — everything in Sraaak's chamber was low and plain, stripped of the small comforts other Prophet Mothers allowed themselves, as if comfort were a form of argument she refused to entertain. The walls were bare stone. The light was minimal. The only object of any distinction was a small carved panel above the door, old enough that its markings had worn to suggestions rather than symbols, depicting something that might have been a woman or might have been a wave.
Dremma had looked at it for forty years and still wasn't certain which.
"You examined her," Sraaak said. Still not turning.
"Yes."
"And you have come to tell me what you found."
"I have come to tell you what I recognized," Dremma said. "Those are different things."
Now Sraaak turned. Her face in the low light was a precise thing — every line deliberate, every expression a decision. She had been beautiful once, in the way that certain women were beautiful before they became something more useful. Now she was formidable, which was better.
"Say it plainly," Sraaak said.
"The biological signature I felt in that woman's hands." Dremma folded her own hands in her lap, because she was old enough to know that the body said things the voice didn't intend to. "I have felt it before. Once. Thirty years ago. In a warrior named Sevaaki, who served in the northern garrison and who disappeared from her post without explanation and was recorded as lost on a government operation."
The room was very quiet.
"Sevaaki is dead," Sraaak said.
"Yes. I believe so." Dremma kept her voice level. "I also believe she did not die on a government operation. I believe she made a choice the council considered unforgivable, and that the consequences of that choice are currently living in an apartment on the twenty-third floor of a building in the dock district, working for a holonews outlet, and doing a very thorough job of investigating the Chancellor's financial records."
