Page 22

"Auren came out in the sixth week of the first year," he said. "That was about twenty minutes. Before today, that was the record."

"Two years."

"Two years, three months, and some number of days. I used to know it exactly. I've lost track of it in the last week, and I'm choosing not to reconstruct the number."

Athena lowered the binoculars and looked at him, and he was already looking back at her. Neither of them said anything for slightly too long to still be about Drogs.

Down in the canyon, an adult came off shift and another one took the perimeter, right on schedule, the way they'd been doing it for four days, for the benefit of absolutely nobody but him.

* * *

She wrote to Marina that night.

She wrote about the council session and Khrelan's objection and the route book. She wrote about Sorenson's fifty-fourth attempt at bread, which had been a step backward, and which Sorenson had taken with the grim composure of a woman who'd expected setbacks and scheduled them into her week. She wrote about Korvath's wing and the medic and the argument about the seal.

She did not write about Varek.

She read the message back before she sent it and noticed the hole where he wasn't, and sat there with her thumb over the send control for a while.

Marina would notice. Not right away, but she would. But her sister had been reading her since before either of them could write, and there was a shape to Athena's letters, and a person-shaped hole in one of them was exactly the sort of thing Marina would find eventually and pick at until it came open.

She could add a line. There's an exiled Weredragon on the surface who has been quietly keeping our patrols alive for two years, and I've started rearranging the rotation to walk past him.

She looked at that sentence in her head for a while.

Then she sent the letter without it, turned out the light, and lay in the dark with the very clear understanding that she had just done something she could not have justified to a review board if her career depended on it.

She wasn't hiding a source anymore.

She was hiding a person, and she'd done it from her own sister, which meant she'd known for a while and had only just now gotten around to admitting it to herself in the dark.

CHAPTER 6

*** VAREK ***

The storm came up out of nothing, which was the only way they ever came, and Varek got about four minutes of warning, which was more than he usually got.

He was on the eastern shelf when the light changed. The secondary sun dimmed, not gradually but in a single step, like something had been drawn across, and the temperature rose fifteen degrees while he was still turning to look at the sky. It was a thermal superstorm, and the vents along the eastern corridor started venting in hard, irregular bursts out of cycle, which meant the pressure differential had already inverted and the storm was no longer coming. It was here.

He had survived four of them, and the rule did not change: get underground and wait, and if you can't get underground, get behind something solid and accept that you're going to be burned. His nearest shelter was three miles north. He could make it if he flew and if the shear didn't put him into a rock face on the way, and the shear was going to try, because the shear always tried.

He was two steps into a launch when he heard the whistle.

It was three short blasts, the patrol emergency recall, the same signal the Colony had used since before he was born, cutting up through the rising wind from somewhere down in the corridor between the eastern and northern sectors.

They were still out.

* * *

He found them nine minutes later, and by then it was bad.

Seven of them, jammed against the leeward wall in the neck of the corridor. Four warriors had gone to combat form and spread their wings into an overlapping wall, which was the correct emergency protocol and which was also going to cost them. Wing membrane is not built to take sustained radiant load, and they'd been holding it for at least six minutes. He could see the membranes going grey at the trailing edges.

The three humans were behind the wall in a tight crouch. He couldn't find Athena at first, and had a moment about that he did not enjoy.

Then the wall shifted and she came out of it, moving down the line, checking each warrior's grip and shouting something the wind ate before it got to him. He came in hard and had to grab the rock face to keep from being thrown straight past them.

"Varek!"