The voices continued below for a while. She couldn't make out words but she could map the shape of the argument — the sharp one pressing, the measured one deflecting, a third voice entering briefly and then going quiet. She sat on the bed and listened and learned nothing specific and catalogued everything anyway.
At some point it stopped.
She got dressed.
Then she sat with her hands in her lap and looked at the crystal across the room and thought about what Dremma had said and hadn't said. He could not have hurt you. Not he chose not to or he was ordered not to. Could not. As if the question of choice didn't enter into it.
She thought about his face on the container above her. That thing that had passed through it.
She filed that too, and waited.
The floor opened again.
He came up the way Dremma had, unhurried, adjusting nothing. His hood was down. In the loading dock she'd had bad light, cold-blurred vision, and the reasonable distraction of expecting to die — now she had pink light and nothing else to look at, and she looked.
He was younger than she'd registered. Not young — there was nothing unfinished about him — but younger than the Fraluma of government reports, the ancient implacable force of official imagery. His hair was a coppery blond, cut close. His skin was warm, a honey-brown that the pink light made richer. His eyes, when they settled on her, were blue-green and steady and giving away nothing she hadn't been given permission to have.
He was also very large, which the dock and the dark had not adequately communicated.
"I will take you home," he said.
"That's what she said." Coreni stood. "You're Edi-Veen?"
"Yes."
"You were going to kill me."
A pause. Not long — just long enough to tell her he was choosing words rather than reaching for them. "That was my order."
"But you didn't."
"No."
"And now you're taking me home."
"Yes."
"And you're not going to tell me why any of this happened."
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a wince. "There are things I am not permitted to discuss." He maintained his stoic and impassive expression, even his eyes remained cold.
"Right." She crossed her arms. "How long have I been here?"
He considered the question with more care than it should have needed. "Sixteen hours."
Sixteen hours. A long time. She remembered the dock, the wave, the attacker, and then this Fraluma’s hands at her shoulders and a word she still didn't have a frame for.
And then nothing, until the pink light and the stone smell and the cold floor.
Sixteen hours of nothing.
That had never happened to her before. Even when she'd been concussed — twice, both occupational — she'd had fragments. Impressions. Not a complete blank.
She didn't say that. She filed it, because that was what she did with things she didn't yet have enough information to understand.
"All right," she said. "Take me home."
He held out a folded cloak. "You will need this."
