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CHAPTER 7

*** ATHENA ***

Athena spent four days after the storm being extremely productive, which was how she knew she was in trouble.

She rewrote the northern route timings against the new thermal data. She sat through two council sessions and said the correct number of words in each. She sparred with Thessok and put him on the mat, and then she sparred with a commander she didn't like and put him on the mat harder than she strictly needed to. She answered Marina's last three messages, none of which had mentioned Varek, because Athena's messages hadn't mentioned Varek, and the two of them were now conducting an entire silent conversation out of the shape of the thing neither of them was saying.

She did all of it very well, and the whole time, underneath, she could still feel the exact weight of his hand turning over under hers in the dark.

That was the part she couldn't work her way out of. She'd held hands with people before. She was thirty-one years old, she'd had a life, she'd held plenty of hands. None of them had felt like a man deciding, in real time, whether he was still allowed to be touched. She kept coming back to the half-second of the flinch, and the way his hand had come back anyway, and she'd catch herself standing in the middle of her office holding a data tablet she'd stopped reading three minutes ago.

Auren noticed. Of course Auren noticed. He didn't say anything about it, which was somehow the loudest thing he could have done, and every time he handed her a cup of tea and didn't say anything, she liked him more and felt worse.

On the fourth day she stopped pretending she had a reason and went up to the surface at last light with a thermal reader she had no intention of using.

* * *

He was on the ridge.

She'd known he would be. That was the thing she'd finally stopped lying to herself about somewhere around the second day. He was always on the ridge at last light, the same way she was always at the gate, two people standing at the edges of two different worlds looking at the same sky and each pretending the other one was a coincidence.

She climbed up to him. There was no patrol this time. No Drogs, no route, no cover story standing between them and having to just be two people who had chosen to be on the same rock. It made the air feel different. The banter was thinner, because the thing the banter usually covered was louder tonight, and they both knew it.

"Ambassador," he said.

"You're on your rock."

"I'm on my rock." He looked at her, and then out at the sky, where the secondary sun was going down white and sharp behind the ridges. "You don't have a patrol with you."

"No."

"You don't have your thermal reader out."

"I have it. I'm holding it. That counts."

"You're holding it upside down."

She looked down. She was holding it upside down. She turned it over with as much dignity as the situation allowed, which was not much, and he did her the enormous kindness of not smiling about it, though she could see it cost him.

"I came up to see you," she said. "That's the whole thing. That's why I'm here. I've been telling myself four different versions of why for four days, and they were all garbage, so I'm going to skip them and just say the true one. I came up to see you."

Varek went very still, the way he'd gone still in the cave when she reached for his hand, the stillness of a man who has learned that good things are usually about to be taken back and is bracing for the taking.

"That's not a smart thing for you to do," he said.

"No."

"I'm a banished man with nothing. You're the human ambassador holding an alliance together with your bare hands. There is a version of this that ends your career and a version that gets me killed, and most of the versions are bad ones."

"I've done the threat assessment. I do them for a living. I know exactly how bad the odds are." She sat down on the rock beside him, close enough that their shoulders were nearly touching. "I came up anyway."

"Why?"

And there it was, the plain question he asked about everything, laid out between them on the rock in the dying light, and she found that this time she had an answer ready, because she'd been building it for four days without admitting that was what she was doing.

"Because you're the first person in a year who's looked at me and seen a person instead of a position," she said. "Everybody in that Colony needs something from the ambassador. Boradrith needs coordinates, Khrelan needs a threat, Kaydren needs a lever, the volunteers need a mother, and Auren." She stopped. "Auren needs something I can't give him, and we both know it, and we're both too kind to say it out loud, which is its own kind of exhausting. And then there's you. You've never needed a single thing from me. You didn't even want to be seen. You just wanted to give somebody a route that would keep them alive, and there was nobody to give it to, and I was the nobody who finally stopped."

Varek was quiet for a long moment.