Not the sound of it — the rooms in the old section were too thick for sound. He felt it the way he felt most things in the Collective, through the ambient awareness that ran like a current beneath the surface of conscious thought. A mind going from absence to presence. Something alert and cautious and immediately, intently focused.
He thought: she looked up at me on the dock.
Most people, in that situation, didn't look up. They looked away, or they looked down, or they held very still and hoped very hard and concentrated on being invisible. She had looked up. She had looked directly at him, in the dark, in the cold, with no advantage and no options, and her eyes had been doing what they always appeared to be doing: collecting everything.
He thought about the word he had said.
He had not planned to say it. There had been no calculation, no decision, no moment of weighing the consequences and concluding they were acceptable. It had simply come out of him the way true things sometimes came out, bypassing the careful architecture he had spent fifteen years constructing between feeling and expression. He had looked down at her and felt what he felt and the word had been there in his mouth before he had decided to speak.
He did not know what to do with that. He was going to have to think about it considerably more than he currently had time to think about it.
He heard the floor panel above him and stepped back as Dremma descended.
She reached the bottom and stood in the passage and looked at him with an expression that was doing what his had been doing since the dock — carrying more than it was showing.
"Well," he said.
"She is asking for her clothes," Dremma said. "I've told her you will take her home."
"What did you find?"
Dremma was quiet for a moment. Long enough that he understood the answer was not a small one and she was deciding how to give it to him. "There is a biological signature in her," she said finally. "In her hands. Her wrists." A pause. "I have felt it before."
He waited.
"Thirty years ago." Her voice was precise and level, the voice she used when she had decided to say a true thing regardless of what the true thing cost. "In a warrior named Sevaaki. Who broke the breeding program. Who left, and was recorded as lost, and whose file is now a single page with most of it blacked out."
The passage was very quiet.
"Dremma —"
"I am not drawing a conclusion," she said. "I am telling you what I recognized. The conclusion is yours and the council's and I am not yet certain I am willing to have it."
He absorbed that. Stood with it for a moment the way he stood with all things that required more space than the immediate moment could give them. "The prophecy says —"
"I know what the prophecy says." Something moved through her expression that he didn't have a name for. "I have also spent forty years watching the council interpret it, and I am not certain we have been interpreting it correctly." She turned toward the passage that led toward the chamber level. "Get her home. Say nothing. Let me bring this to Sraaak before Sraaak comes to it herself, which she will, and soon."
"Dremma."
She paused.
"You believe it," he said. "Don't you."
She looked at him over her shoulder for a moment. Her face was composed and tired and entirely itself.
"I believe," she said carefully, "that I held her hands and felt what I felt. And that it is not nothing." She turned away. "It is not nothing, Edi-Veen."
She moved down the passage and he heard her footsteps slow and stop, and then the lower door, and then the voices beginning — hers and Sraaak's, in the chamber below, the sharp one and the measured one, carrying through the old stone of the Collective the way everything carried down here, the way nothing that was said stayed only between the people who said it.
He listened to the shape of it. He did not try to make out words.
He had his own words to prepare.
Chapter Three
Coreni
Waking came slowly for Coreni.
