Page 3 of Kavan

Rhoran Vesk finds me at first light, looking at the cliff the way he looks at everything, as though it has personally disappointed him.

"You slept," he says.

"No."

"I know. I was being polite."

I hand him the polymer and he turns it over twice.

"Eight days," he says.

"Ten."

"Ten." He pockets it. "Harbor authority, then?"

The harbor sits forty minutes south, and the man who runs it is named Sarno, and Sarno has learned over four years that I don't leave until he tells me something true. Registered hull traffic is down for the season. Unregistered traffic is not. Two crews have been buying local dive gear with League scrip and paying too much for it, and a fuel barge out of the southern chain has been running the eastern approach at night with its transponder cold.

It isn't enough for an arrest. It's more than enough for me.

I put Vesk on a double rotation, one cycle of it unscheduled so it can't be predicted, and move the perimeter markers out a hundred and fifty meters. Then I go back to camp and spend two days watching the archaeologist ignore me.

She's good. That's the difficulty.

Dr. Larkin has thirty-one people, six disciplines, and a survey window shortened by weather, and she has all of it moving by mid-morning without raising her voice once. She assigns Marchant to the geology because he's careful. She puts Neris on the drone lattice because Neris is quick. She catches an error in the excavation grid before it's transcribed and corrects it without embarrassing the man who made it.

She also removes her locator to work in the water tank, and enters an unswept overhang because she saw a shadow that interested her, which are two of the three things I asked her not to do, inside four hours.

I say nothing. I move to where I can see the overhang.

On the fourth morning she's on her stomach in the ash with her arm buried to the shoulder in a gap between two boulders that no survey drone has flagged, and when she pulls free she's holding a fistful of black grit and grinning like she has won something.

"It's hollow," she says. "Eli. Eli. It's hollow behind here."

It takes them ninety minutes to clear it. Behind the boulders there's an opening two meters across, framed in dressed stone, sealed by nothing but time and dirt. Twelve satellite passes missed it. My own sweep missed it. She found it because a shadow fell in a direction that shadows shouldn't fall.

"Marshal." She sits back on her heels, filthy to the elbows, and looks up at me with her whole face lit. "Say something."

"Your observation is exceptional."

"Was that painful?"

"Yes."

That gets a laugh out of her, sudden and unguarded, and something in me turns over that has never turned over before.

I want to be precise about this, because I intend to spend the assignment pretending it didn't happen. It isn't attraction. Attraction I have felt and managed and set down again. This is lower and older and it arrives without asking, a recognition running up from the marrow, and there's a word for it in my language.

We call it ashari, the one the blood chooses.

My grandmother used to say it took a lifetime to know. She was wrong, or she was being kind. It takes one laugh in the dirt.

She doesn't know, and she can't know. She's a human woman who has spent her life leaving planets, and if I tell her that Vakutan physiology has quietly assigned her to me without consulting either of us, she'll put a continent between us, or worse, she'll feel obligated.

So I'll carry it, the way I carry everything else.

"We're going in," she says, on her feet now, already checking her lamp.

"Not yet."