Page 5

“It's leverage. Bring the boat back.”

He comes back. He does it slowly, so I understand that it's a decision and not a defeat, and when I climb down he doesn't offer a hand, and I don't ask for one.

In daylight I can finally look at him without the excuse of being terrified.

He's close to seven feet, and built like the answer to a question nobody wanted asked. Scaled skin that sits somewhere between emerald and moss until he decides otherwise. Golden eyes with slit pupils that narrow when he's calculating and widen when he's listening, which is a tell he clearly doesn't know he has. Black spines run the length of his back and shoulders, and they aren't decorative; I watched them lift and flatten toward the sun this morning like something with an appetite. There's a tail. There are scars, a great many of them, old and pale against the green.

He notices me cataloguing him and says nothing, which is somehow worse than if he'd said something.

“You're staring.”

“I'm learning. It's an occupational condition.”

The looted island looks smaller in the morning. Draeven walks the perimeter first, slowly, and I follow because I've decided that following is going to be my whole personality until he stops treating me like cargo.

“Stay clear of the trench,” he says.

“Why?”

“Because I haven't finished reading it.”

So I keep off the trench and read something else instead.

Here is the thing nobody understands about a classroom. You learn to see the one child in thirty who has moved. Not the noise, not the mess, not the obvious thing in the middle of the room. The small wrongness at the edge that everybody's eyes slide over.

The reeds on the eastern rim of the island have been cut.

Not trampled. Cut, at knee height, in a band about two meters wide, and then the cut ends have been pushed down into the mud so the break doesn't show from the water. It's tidy work. It's older than the trench.

“Draeven.”

He's beside me faster than something that size has any business being, and he goes down on one knee and puts his hand flat against the pushed-down stalks, and holds it there long enough that I start to wonder whether I've wasted his morning.

“Three weeks,” he says. “Maybe four.”

“Before the theft.”

“Well before it.” He rises. “They were sitting here. Watching this island, in shifts, from a boat they didn't want seen, for at least a month before anything came out of the ground.”

“Then they weren't following me.”

“No.” He looks north, out over the water, at nothing I can see. “They were finishing something they started on your uncle.”

I sit down on the edge of a very old alien machine and let that arrive properly.

He gives me the time. He doesn't fill it, doesn't tell me it's all right, doesn't do a single one of the things people did at the funeral. He simply stands there with his back to me, watching the water, until I'm ready.

“Okay,” I say. “Then we're not chasing one crystal. We're chasing whatever they've been waiting forty years for.”

“We.”

“You can keep saying that word back to me. It doesn't do anything.”

I spread the map on my knees with the second crystal beside it, and I work.

Garrick's cipher isn't a code so much as a habit. He wrote the way he thought, in shorthand he never expected anybody to need, and after six days I have perhaps a fifth of it. Nouns come easiest. Distances come at all only because he was compulsive about them.

But the line under the island drawing has a group I know, because it appears in three other places in the same journal, and every time it appears, it comes with a bearing.