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"That's a shift schedule."

"It's exactly a shift schedule. Eleven hours, two on and one down, and they hold it to inside about a quarter hour." Varek was flat on the stone beside her, close enough that she could hear him breathing. "Nobody in the Colony believes me about this."

"You've told people?"

"I told people for six years before the banishment. Drog behavior gets treated as instinct in every field manual this Colony has ever produced. It is not instinct. There's instinct in it, the same way there's instinct in us, and there is also a laying female who has put her adults on a watch rotation."

Athena lowered the binoculars. "Do you know what that's worth?"

"I know exactly what it's worth. That is why I kept surveying after there was nobody left to give it to."

She looked at the side of his face.

Up close, in daylight, he was a wreck. She'd known that from the canyon, but she'd been busy in the canyon. The amber-gold had become matte and dark under two years of mineral dust. The plates along his forearms were scored and re-scored. There was a long pale seam on his left shoulder where something had opened him up and nobody had closed it properly. His hair was tied back with a strip of cured Drog hide, because there was nothing else on the whole surface to tie it with.

He looked like the planet had been working on him for two years. He also looked, lying flat on a ridge narrating a Drog shift rotation, more completely and purely occupied than anyone she had met in a year.

"You should be teaching this," she said.

"To whom?"

"To the surface rotation. All of it. Forty warriors in a room and you at the front with a terrain model."

"I'm not permitted inside the walls."

"I know what you're not permitted to do. I'm telling you what you should be doing." She rolled onto her side to look at him. "Boradrith reversed his entire position on the human alliance in about nine days, because my sister put data in front of him that he couldn't argue with. He's not inflexible. He's frightened and evidence-based, and those two things together mean he can be moved, if you move him with the right thing."

"Your sister was offering food to a starving planet. She had leverage."

"You're offering four hundred square miles of terrain intelligence and a Drog behavioral model that overturns every field manual in the building."

"I'm offering it as the man who called him a coward in front of the settlements."

"Yes," Athena said. "And in about a month there are going to be forty warriors who know your name because it's in the route book, and Khrelan just told a full council session your corridor should have been in there two years ago, and that is not nothing. That's a floor. You build on floors."

Varek didn't answer for a while.

"Why do you care?" he said.

He asked it plainly, the way he asked everything, and she found she didn't have a prepared version ready to hand him.

"Because you were right," she said. "And being right cost you your whole life, and nobody has said so out loud in three years, and I've been on the wrong end of that particular arrangement. I know exactly what it does to a person."

"You've been banished."

"No,” Athena replied. “I got told I was wrong about a thing I was right about, by people with more rank than me. I got moved sideways for it, and it cost me about four years of my career, and I never got the four years back." She shrugged. "It's not the same. It's not even close to the same. It's the same shape, though."

"What was it about?"

"Later," Athena said, and surprised herself, because later was a promise, and she had not meant to make him one.

He let it go, which she was starting to find unnerving, because in her experience the people who let things go were the people who weren't paying attention, and Varek was paying attention to everything.

They lay on the ridge another minute, watching the adults work their rotation.

"How long since you talked to anybody this long?" she asked.

He was quiet for a moment.