The Mark

Aventhal had got smaller while they were away, which was not true and was the first thing Vaelith Sorin thought when she came up the harbor road with a case in each hand.

It was the same city. That was the trouble. The terraces went up exactly as far as they had always gone up, and the fog had come off the bay before dawn and gone back by ten as it had done for four thousand years, and the water was the same cold flat blue. Nothing had shrunk.

She had simply spent two years on a plateau where you could see to the curve of the world, and had come home to a place with a lid on it.

"You're doing a face," Kyra said, behind her.

"I'm carrying two cases."

"You're carrying two cases and doing a face. It's the one from the lander." Kyra shifted her own bag and came up level, and stopped, and looked down the hill at the harbor with an expression that was not the expression of someone who had thought the city had shrunk. "God, though. Look at all the water."

"It's a bay."

"It's an obscene amount of water, Val. There's no reason for that much water. You could drown eleven thousand people in that and still have some left over." She was grinning. "I'd forgotten it does that thing where it moves."

Val looked at the bay, which was doing the thing where it moved, and found that she had forgotten it too.

They split at the Ammery Steps, because Kyra was going down to the second terrace and Val was going up to the eighth, and it was the first time in two years that either of them had gone anywhere without the other.

Neither of them commented on that.

"Fifthday," Kyra said.

"Fifthday."

"Bring everything. All of it, the whole crate, I don't care how heavy it is, if we start sorting field notes in the eleventh week I'll walk into the sea."

"You've just told me there's too much of it."

"I contain multitudes," said Kyra Davan, and went down the steps two at a time.

Emrin was waiting at the bottom.

He had not written to say he would be. He was standing at the corner where the steps came out onto the second terrace with his hands in his pockets, and Kyra saw him from about forty feet up and stopped dead in the middle of a public staircase with her bag on her shoulder.

Two years is a long time. She had thought about this. She had thought about it more than she had admitted to anyone including herself, and every version she had constructed had been either enormous or awful, and what actually happened was that she came down the last eleven steps and put her bag on the ground and said:

"You've cut your hair."

"Two years ago."

"You didn't say."

"I didn't think it was news." Emrin Solveth looked at her. "You're browner. And thinner. And you've gone all — " He made a gesture that took in her shoulders, her stance, something. "You stand differently."

"That's altitude."

"Is it."

"It's four thousand feet of altitude and a woman called Marenne who thought I ran like a wet place." Kyra rubbed the back of her neck. "Are you going to hug me or are we going to do this on a street corner?"

He hugged her.

It was good. That was the thing she would think about later, on and off, for a long while — that it was good, that she was glad, that there was nothing wrong with any of it. He smelled the way he had always smelled. He held on slightly longer than was strictly comfortable, which he had always done, and which she had always liked.

And underneath the gladness, in a place she did not go into, something did not move at all.

"Right," Emrin said, letting go. "Your mother's cooked."

"How much has she cooked?"

"For eleven people."

"There are four of us."

"There are four of us," he agreed, "and your father's been standing in the yard since the second hour looking up the road, and I've been sent to fetch you because if he came himself he'd cry in public."

Kyra picked up her bag.

"He'll cry anyway," she said.

"He will absolutely cry anyway."

The Sorin house had a new door.

Val stood in front of it for slightly longer than a person normally stands in front of a door. It was a good door. The old one had swollen every winter and had to be shouldered, and this one presumably did not, and there was no reason on Sethal for her to feel about it the way she was feeling about it.

Then it opened, and Novi was on the other side of it, and Novi was not sixteen.

"You're gray," said her sister.

"I'm what?"

"Your skin. You've gone gray. Is that the light up there? Mother's cousin said the light does things." Novi took a case out of her hand without asking, which she had also done two years ago, and which landed in Val's chest with unreasonable force. "Come in, don't stand there, there's a whole — Father's got people, he's got people in the long room, I told him not to and he's got people."

"How many people?"

"Six. Seven. They're being political at each other." Novi hauled the case over the step. "You look well, actually. You look like somebody who's been outdoors. It's very disturbing."

She was twenty now. She had a house on the fourth terrace and a husband called Teln and a garden she wrote about, and she had cut her hair short in a way that Val had known about from a letter and had not been able to picture, and the picture she had constructed had been wrong in every particular.

"Novi."

"What."

Val discovered that she had nothing to put after it.

"Nothing," she said.

Novi looked at her for a moment with an expression that was harder to get anything past than it had been two years ago.

"Right," she said. "Come and be looked at."

Vaedom Sorin embraced his daughter in front of seven members of the Assembly, which was, from him, the equivalent of a public collapse.

Afterward, when the seven had gone, they stood at the windows of the long room in the last of the light with the bay going the color it went.

"The bill passed," he said.

"I know. You wrote."

"I wrote three lines. I've thought about writing the rest of it perhaps eleven times." He turned his glass. "The custody arrangements are what I said they'd be. The fold program has its funding, it sits under the Vayr now, and there's a board that oversees what comes out of it and what goes into it and who gets to look at any of it."

"You voted for it."

"I did."

"You said you had reservations."

"I did say that." Vaedom looked out at the water. "I'm not going to burden you with them."

Val, who was twenty-one years old and had been away for two years and had come home carrying a sealed tube in the bottom of a case of field notebooks, said nothing at all.

Neither of them ever remarked on the sentence. It went past the way sentences do.

The Vayr took them back in the ninth month, and the Vayr had decided in their absence that they were a pair.

That was the word. It was in the notices. It was in the way the faculty said their names, which was together and in the same breath and always in the same order, Sorin and Davan, as though it were a firm. Two fourth-years back from a full field placement with two years of joint data was not a common thing and the Vayr was quietly delighted about it, and everyone from the porter upward assumed a closeness that was so nearly accurate that Val found she could not correct it without lying.

They had not talked about Thennet. Not properly. Not once, in the eleven months since a cold store and a manifest and a lander going up in the middle of the afternoon.

They had talked about everything else.

The Account was explained to the fourth-years on the fourth day of term, in the assembly hall, by a woman from the faculty who did it the way you explain something everyone in the room has been thinking about for three years.

You presented your work. All of it, entire, in public: your data, your method, your reasoning, your conclusions, and your provenance. You stood at the front of that hall in front of the faculty and both houses and anyone else who cared to come, and you gave your account, and then you were questioned, and the questioning was the part that mattered and could go on for a very long time.

It happened at the end of the year. Preparing for it took the entire year.

"You will notice," the faculty woman said, "that I have not once used the word examination. It is not one. You cannot fail the Account. You can be found to have given a poor one, and that is a different and considerably worse thing, and it follows you." She looked around the hall. "We are not testing whether you know your work. We are asking whether you can be answerable for it in front of people. That is the whole of the qualification. Everything else you have done here is a prerequisite."

Beside Val, Kyra sat forward with her forearms on her knees and did not move for the rest of it.

Val sat back and looked at the ceiling of a hall she had sat in as a first-year on her fourth evening, when a girl she disliked had leaned on a courtyard wall in the dark afterward and said something about being answerable that had annoyed her for eleven weeks.

"You're doing a face," Kyra murmured, without turning her head.

"I'm listening."

"You're doing the face and listening. It's a new one." Kyra's mouth moved. "You hate this."

"I don't hate it."

"Val. You have to stand up in a room and explain yourself to two hundred people for as long as they feel like asking."

"I'm aware."

"I've wanted to do this since I was nine."

"I'm aware of that too," Val said, and the woman at the front went on explaining the submission dates, and neither of them said anything else.

— end of chapter one —

They were given a room in the west range with two benches, a window, and a door that locked, and Val understood within a day that the room was a statement.

Fourth-years did not get rooms. Fourth-years got a share of a bench in whatever faculty had space, and they carried their work back and forth in boxes, and they queued for instruments. Sorin and Davan had been given a door.

"They've bet on us," Kyra said, from the floor, where she had emptied the first crate.

"They've bet on the data."

"Same thing this year." She held up a field notebook, squinted at the spine, and set it in a pile. "Do you know what I think is going to happen? I think we're going to spend a month convincing ourselves it's less interesting than we remember."

"Why?"

"Because everyone does. Because you come home from a place and the place stops being real and then you look at your own notes and think, that can't be right, I must have been altitude-drunk." Another notebook onto the pile. "And then some morning in the eleventh week you'll say a number out loud and I'll go cold and we'll be off again."

Val, sorting sample logs at the bench, said, "It took four nights last time."

"What did?"

"To find the shape of it. On Thennet. You came into the common room at some appalling hour and said the field was wrong and it took the two of us four nights to work out what we had." She did not look up. "I've thought about those four nights fairly often."

There was a small silence behind her.

"So have I," Kyra said.

And that was the closest either of them came, that whole month, to talking about Thennet.

The old rhythm came back inside an afternoon, which frightened Val more than she let on.

She had spent the voyage home half-expecting it to be gone. Two years of extraordinary work and then a road in the cold and a manifest with three signatures on it, and she had assumed — the way you assume about a thing you cannot bear to examine — that whatever had made them good would have been broken by the rest of it.

It had not been broken. It was sitting exactly where they left it.

Pass me that. What's your baseline. Not that one, the other one. Say the number again. You're wrong.

"I'm not wrong."

"You're wrong about the third season," Val said. "You've got the correction going the same direction in both hemispheres and it can't."

"It can if the source isn't planetary."

"The source is planetary."

"You don't know that."

"Neither do you, which is my entire point—"

"Which is my entire point." Kyra came off her stool. "Val. If the bias were planetary it would have a dipole and it doesn't, I've been looking for a dipole for two years, there is no dipole, and if you're going to make me put a source in the Account I am going to have to stand up in front of two hundred people and say I don't know in the questioning, which is fine, that's allowed, but I'd rather we knew."

"So would I."

"So stop telling me it's planetary."

"I'll stop telling you it's planetary," Val said, "when you stop telling me my lichen are doing something thermodynamically impossible."

Kyra opened her mouth. Then she laughed — the loud one, the one that came out of her whole chest and carried down the corridor — and sat back down.

"All right," she said. "All right. Both of us are wrong. That's better anyway."

Ilen Vosse came to find them in the second week and was so much worse than the last time that Kyra put a hand on his arm before she could stop herself.

"You've stopped eating."

"I eat constantly."

"You've stopped eating food. Ilen, you're the color of a wall." She steered him into the good chair, which was Val's. "Sit down and tell us everything and I'm getting you something from the kitchens and you are not going to argue about it."

"I'll argue a bit."

"You can argue after."

He was twenty-two and looked forty and was, by an enormous distance, the happiest person either of them knew.

"They've moved me off transcription," he said, once she had gone. "Two years on the eleventh series and they've moved me up and given me a desk and I have — Val, I have correspondence. People write to me. About the notation. There are people in this building who read Dael because I taught them the notation, which is absurd, I learned it out of a book that was wrong."

"That's good, Ilen."

"It's very good." He turned his cup around. He had not drunk out of it. "I put a proposal up."

"You said. In your note."

"I put it up again. Formally, through the faculty, with two names on it that aren't mine." He said it lightly, and there was nothing light in the way he was holding the cup. "You can't sit on a method for four thousand years and call it scholarship. Either the eleventh series is what it says it is or it isn't, and there's exactly one way to find out, and everyone in the drive faculty knows that and nobody will write it down."

Val said, "What does the board say?"

"The board says it is a matter for the board."

"That's a no."

"That's a not-yet." Ilen put the cup down, finally, and looked up with an expression of perfect equanimity. "I'm twenty-two. I've got about two hundred years. I can wait them out."

Kyra came back with a plate and stood in the doorway for a second before she came in, because from the corridor the two of them looked like something she did not want to interrupt.

She had been thinking, on and off, for eleven months, about the fact that neither of them had said anything.

Not about the cold store. Not about Ossa Vey in a doorway, or a road at night, or the fortnight afterward when Marenne Vey had stopped drinking tea in a building she had drunk tea in three days a week for two years. Not about the manifest. Not one word, on the lander, or the crossing, or the coach, or in the ninth month when the Vayr took them back and started saying their names in the same breath.

They had come home and gone straight back to work, and the work was good, and the work had a door that locked.

And Kyra Davan, who could not carry an unanswered thing, had discovered that she could carry this one indefinitely, and had not examined why.

"Eat that," she said, putting the plate down. "All of it. I'll know."

— end of chapter two —

Everyone at the Vayr wanted to hear about Thennet, and Kyra Davan had discovered that she was bored to death of Thennet.

It was not that she minded talking. She had never minded talking. It was that there were four questions and everyone asked them in the same order — what was the air like, what were the Vey like, were you frightened, would you go back — and she had polished four answers into something so smooth that she could hear herself doing it, and the smoothness had begun to feel like a small dishonesty she performed eleven times a week.

So when the boy at the Solara table said something else, she noticed.

He was an offlander. She had seen him about — you saw offlanders about, there were perhaps forty at the Vayr in any year, from the two nearer worlds and the stations and one or two from further out, and they mostly moved in a loose herd of their own and were treated with the elaborate courtesy Sethal reserved for people it had no intention of understanding.

He sat down across from her in the Solara hall with a bowl and said, "You're the one who came back from the high place."

"That's me."

"Right." He ate for a while.

Kyra waited for the four questions.

"What are you going to do when it's over?" he said.

"When what's over?"

"The Account. All this." He gestured with the spoon at the hall, the house, the whole enormous stone drum of it. "You've got a year. Everyone here talks about the Account like it's the top of a hill and nobody ever says what's on the other side of it."

Kyra opened her mouth and found, with genuine surprise, that she did not have a polished answer.

"Field biology's got somewhere to go," he said, when she did not fill the gap. "Your friend'll walk into a station somewhere and be running it in ten years. Stellar chemistry at your level is nine people on this planet and eight of them are alive."

"That's not—" She stopped. "That's approximately correct, actually."

"I know. I looked." He was not being unkind about it; he said it the way you say a measurement. "So what happens? You take the ninth chair when somebody dies?"

"I don't know."

"Huh," said the boy, and went back to his bowl.

She should have left it there. She had eleven things to do that evening.

"You've got a view of us," she said.

"I've got a view of everywhere. It's what offlanders are for."

"Go on then."

He put the spoon down.

"Sethal is the finest thing I have ever seen," he said, "and it has stopped asking itself questions, and nobody here can tell, because when a place is that good the not-asking looks like confidence."

Kyra sat back.

"That's a very large thing to say to a stranger over a bowl."

"You asked."

"I did ask." She studied him. He was unremarkable to look at and entirely comfortable in his own body, which was rarer at the Vayr than it should have been. "What's your name?"

"Deyn Arrol."

"Kyra Davan."

"I know," said Deyn Arrol. "Everyone knows. That's rather my point."

And then somebody called him from the far end of the table, and he took his bowl and went, and that was the whole of it.

Here is what Kyra Davan did not do, ever, in the whole of her life.

She did not turn things over. She was not built for it. Things happened and she responded to them at the time, fully and loudly and with her whole chest, and then they were done and she went on to the next thing, and this had been true since she was small and had run eleven miles beside a herd because she wanted to see how far she could get.

She thought about that conversation for nine days.

She thought about it in the west range with a sheet of numbers in front of her. She thought about it on the cliff path in the dark at six in the morning, which was the one place she had never in her life thought about anything. She got most of the way through a letter to Emrin and stopped, because what she wanted to write was somebody asked me what happens afterward and I have no idea, and she could not put that in a letter to a man on the second terrace who was waiting.

On the fourth day she caught herself constructing a rebuttal in the wash room and said, out loud, to nobody: "Oh, this is ridiculous."

On the ninth day she went and found him.

He was in the lower reading room, which nobody used, with three books open and a cold cup at his elbow.

"You're wrong," Kyra said.

Deyn Arrol looked up without any surprise whatsoever, which she found infuriating.

"About what?"

"About the questions. We ask questions constantly, it's the entire — this is a research university, we are drowning in questions—"

"You ask questions inside the answer." He moved a book so she could sit down, which was presumptuous, and she sat down. "You've got the finest physics in this arm of anywhere and you use it eleven times a day and there's a limit on it that nobody can beat and everybody has agreed to be frustrated about that rather than curious about it. Four thousand years. There's a man in your archive who beat it and the general view is that he made a mistake."

"That's not—" Kyra stopped. "How do you know about Dael?"

"There's a boy in the drive faculty who won't stop talking about him."

"Ilen."

"Ilen." Deyn nodded. "He'll be run out of here or he'll run it, and I genuinely could not tell you which."

They argued for three hours.

She won some of it, which she had not expected and which was the part that stayed with her. He conceded two points cleanly and immediately, without any of the maneuvering that Sethal men her age did when they were losing, and both times he said "yes, that's right" and moved on, and both times something in Kyra Davan sat up and paid attention.

At the eleventh hour the reading room attendant came through and looked at them, and they went out into the cold together and stood on the steps.

"Same time?" Deyn said.

Kyra, who was bonded, who had a plan, who had never in her life had to go and find anybody, said:

"Yes."

— end of chapter three —

It took two months, and Kyra could have stopped it at any point in the first six weeks, and knew that at the time, and would say so afterward to the only person she ever told.

They argued in the lower reading room twice a week. Then three times. Then it stopped being about arguing and neither of them acknowledged the change for a while, and the not-acknowledging became its own thing, a heat under an ordinary conversation about fold notation and the state of the kitchens.

She was aware of exactly what was happening. That was the part she could never make sound better than it was. She was not swept along, she was not confused, she did not wake one morning to find herself somewhere she had not intended to go. She walked into it with her eyes open over the course of two months, one reading room at a time, and at every single stage she could have said I'm bonded and gone home.

She said it once, in the fifth week.

"I'm bonded."

"I know," Deyn said. "You told me in the second conversation."

"I'm saying it again."

"All right." He waited. "Are you saying it to me or are you saying it in front of me?"

Kyra did not answer that for a long time.

The biology conversation happened before anything else did, which she would also want on the record.

It happened in the reading room, at a table, fully clothed, in the manner of two people who had both grown up in scientific families and had no idea how to be young about anything.

"We should talk about the obvious thing," he said.

"Which obvious thing."

"Kyra."

"I'd like to hear you say it."

"I'm from four systems out," Deyn said, "and you're from here, and our species diverged so long ago that nobody has usefully dated it, and we are close enough to be interfertile and far enough apart that nobody sensible would promise you what happens if we—" He made a gesture. "That."

"Interfertile."

"Probably. There's a literature."

"There's a literature?"

"There's a small literature," he said, "and I have read all of it, which took an evening, and I want to be honest with you that most of it is about two other pairings and none of it is about mine and yours."

So they read it. Both of them, over about a week, separately and then together — the way two people with training read a thing, arguing about the sample sizes.

What it said, in summary, was: usually nothing. Occasionally something. The something was not predictable and not, in the recorded cases, dangerous, and the recorded cases numbered eleven.

"Eleven," Kyra said.

"Eleven across four hundred years and three species pairs. It's not a literature, it's an anecdote with references."

"And the somethings?"

"Dermal, mostly. Pigment changes. One case of a persistent sensitivity." He turned the sheet around so she could see it. "Nobody died. Nobody got ill. Two of the eleven had something they could see afterward and one of those was permanent."

Kyra looked at the page for a while.

"One in eleven," she said.

"One in eleven, from a sample so bad I would not accept it in a first-year submission."

"Would you accept it in your own life?"

Deyn Arrol was quiet.

"I have thought about almost nothing else for a month," he said. "And I've decided I would, and I want to say the whole of that sentence, which is: I would, and I have no right to decide it for you, and you should take longer than I did."

That was the moment. She could see it while it was happening, which was a strange and specific sensation and not one she had ever had before.

Not the reading room. Not the arguing. That sentence, and the fact that he had said the second half of it.

"Right," Kyra said.

She took eleven days.

She spent them being extremely rigorous, which she had come by honestly and which turned out to be no use whatsoever, because at the end of eleven days of rigor she had established that the risk was small and poorly characterized and that she wanted him anyway, and that the wanting had not been arrived at by any method at all.

On the eleventh evening she went to the lower reading room and he was there, and she said, "Not here."

And he said, "No. Not here."

His rooms were in the offlander range, at the top, under the roof, and the heating did not reach that far and neither did anybody else.

It was cold. She would remember that first — how cold it was, and how little either of them cared, and the fact that they were both laughing at some point about something that was not funny.

She had been touched before. She had done all of it properly, in a room, in front of a hundred and forty people, with a good man she liked.

Nobody had told her it could be like this.

That was the discovery and it arrived with a kind of violence: not the act, but the plain fact that there had been a whole enormous country here the entire time and she had walked past the edge of it at eighteen and gone home and said, out loud, on some gravel, that she was not going to pretend.

She had been so proud of that. She had been proud of it for four years.

Afterward, in the dark, under a roof, with the cold coming in and neither of them moving:

"Say something," Deyn said.

"I'm thinking."

"That's what worries me."

Kyra laughed, and the laugh did something to her chest that she had not authorized.

"I've been telling people for four years that I'm honest," she said. "That's the thing about me. That's my — everybody knows it. Kyra says what's true, Kyra can't hold a thing in, you'll always know where you are with her." She was looking at the ceiling. "And I have been walking around inside the largest untrue thing of my life for two months and I did not notice, because I never said one false word. Not one. I just didn't say any of the real ones."

"That's not the same as lying."

"Isn't it?"

"No," he said. "But it's not nothing either, and I don't think you want me to tell you it is."

She turned her head and looked at him in the dark.

"How are you like this," she said.

"Like what?"

"Twenty-three and able to say the second half of the sentence."

"My mother," Deyn said. "It's not a virtue, it's a habit, and it makes me quite hard to be in a room with, which you may have noticed."

"I've noticed."

They lay there a while.

"Ask me the other thing," he said.

"Which other thing?"

"The one you've been not asking since you got here."

Kyra propped herself on an elbow.

"Are you in love with me," she said.

"Yes."

"That was fast."

"It was two months ago." He said it without any drama. "You asked, I answered. I'm not asking you back and I want you to notice that I'm not, because you'd tell me the truth and I've read enough of your face this evening to think I know what it is and I'd rather have it in your own time than in a bed at the eleventh hour when you're tired."

And Kyra Davan — who had stood on gravel and told a good man she would not say it back because it would not be true — lay in the dark under a roof on the far side of a decision she had taken eleven days to make, and discovered that the sentence was sitting right there, entirely available, obviously true.

She did not say it.

Not because it was false. Because the moment she said it out loud it stopped being only hers, and it went into the world, and it could be looked at.

She would not understand what she had just done, or where she had seen it done before, for a very long time.

— end of chapter four —

It began, as these things do, with a bottle that neither of them had intended to open and a piece of work that would not come out right.

They had been in the west range since the sixth hour. It was now considerably later than that. The third season correction had defeated them for the fourth consecutive evening and at some point Kyra had gone out and come back with something from the Solara cellars, and they had drunk rather more of it than two people preparing for the Account had any business drinking.

"Right," Kyra said, from the floor. She had migrated to the floor at some point and showed no sign of returning. "New subject. I've got a question and you're going to hate it."

"Then don't ask it."

"That's not how questions work." She rolled onto her side and propped her head on her hand. "Aro Keth."

Val, at the bench, went entirely still.

"What about him."

"That's it. That's the question. Aro Keth." Kyra gestured broadly with the hand that was not holding her head up. "Two years, Val. Two years we lived in a building with two rooms and I found out about that man from the way you took your coat off, and then we had the worst row of our lives about it, and then we came home, and in eleven months you have not said one single word about him and I have not asked. Not once. Do you know what that cost me?"

"You've mentioned the cost before."

"The cost was enormous."

Val put down what she was holding.

She could feel, quite precisely, the two available responses: the one where she said something dry and turned back to the bench, and the other one. The first was entirely available. It was practically pre-assembled. She had used it a thousand times and it worked every time.

She was tired, and it was late, and they had been wrong about the same number for four evenings in a row, and there was a woman on the floor of a locked room who had waited eleven months without asking.

"He fixed pumps," Val said.

"I know he fixed pumps."

"That's genuinely the most interesting thing about him. I want to be accurate." She came off the stool and sat down on the floor with her back against the bench, which she had never done in her life. "He was twenty-four. He was from four days east where there's actual soil. He had a mother who taught him with her hands over his and he mentioned her about once a week and never at any length. He was not clever. He was not stupid either, he was — I don't know the word. He was finished. He knew what he was and he'd stopped inquiring into it, and I found that restful, and I have thought since that it might be the single least admirable reason to want somebody."

Kyra had gone very quiet, in the way she went quiet when she did not want to interrupt something.

"How did it start?"

"The refrigeration unit broke."

"That's how it started."

"That's how it started twice." Val looked at the ceiling. "The second time I'd already worked out how to fix it. I stood in that station at the sixth hour with a tool in my hand and the fault diagnosed and I put the tool down and picked up the housing and walked three miles in weather that did not require anybody to walk anywhere."

"Val."

"I'm aware."

"You walked three miles in the cold to a man who—"

"I'm aware," Val said, "and I knew it at the time, which is the part I've never been able to make sound better."

Kyra started laughing.

"Oh, that's lovely," she said. "That's the best thing I've ever heard. Vaelith Sorin walking three miles across a plateau with a broken cabinet she could fix in her sleep—"

"It wasn't broken."

"It wasn't what?"

"The second time." Val examined the far wall. "I broke it."

Kyra Davan made a sound like a kettle and put both hands over her face.

It went on for some time after that.

"All right," Kyra said, when she had recovered. "All right. My turn. Ask me something."

"I don't know what to ask."

"Ask me anything, you've just given me a broken cabinet, I owe you—"

"Is there somebody?"

The pause was about a second long, and Val — who had been reading that face for four years — saw the whole of it go past.

"There's somebody," Kyra said.

"Solara?"

"Offlander."

Val turned her head. "Offlander."

"Four systems out. Deyn Arrol. He's in the lower reading room most evenings arguing with three books." Kyra was looking at the ceiling now too. "He asked me what I'm going to do when the Account is over and I didn't have an answer and I've been annoyed about it since the ninth month."

"That's not an answer to my question."

"No," Kyra agreed. "It isn't."

And then, because they had drunk too much of something from the Solara cellars, and because it was late, and because a woman had just told her about a cabinet:

"He does a thing."

Val waited.

"His species does a thing," Kyra said. "It's involuntary. He can't stop it and he has literally never thought to mention it to anybody because where he's from it's about as remarkable as a sneeze."

"What sort of thing?"

"I'm not going to describe it."

"You've raised it."

"I've raised it and now I'm regretting raising it—"

"Kyra."

"It's a sound," Kyra said, into her hands. "It's a sound and it happens at a completely specific moment and the first time it happened I sat bolt upright and said what was that and he said, and I want you to understand that he said this with total sincerity, he said: what was what."

Val stared at her.

"He doesn't know he does it."

"He does not know he does it. It is not in his awareness. I have had to explain to a grown man—"

"What kind of sound?"

"I'm not doing it."

"Kyra."

"I am not going to make the sound in the west range at the eleventh hour—"

She made the sound.

Vaelith Sorin, who had not laughed properly in public since a cold path in a break at the end of her first year, went over sideways onto the floor of a locked room and stayed there for some considerable time.

"Right," Val said eventually, from the floor, wiping her eyes. "Now I've got a question."

"Go on."

"Is that normal? For his species. Is it universal or is it him?"

Kyra lifted her head. "That's your question."

"It's a perfectly reasonable question. If it's involuntary and unremarked then it's presumably fixed rather than individual, which would make it a species trait, and species traits have — Kyra, why are you looking at me like that."

"Because you're doing biology at me."

"I'm asking a—"

"You are lying on a floor at the eleventh hour asking whether my — " Kyra's voice failed her briefly. "Val. I love you. I want you to know that a normal person would have asked me what he's like."

"What's he like?"

"Too late."

"That's very unfair."

"It's completely fair and you know it."

They lay on the floor of the west range with the lamp on and a third season correction that was still wrong on the bench above them.

"He's better than me," Kyra said, after a while. "That's what he's like. He says the second half of the sentence. Every time. The half everybody leaves off."

"I don't know what that means."

"You will," said Kyra Davan.

Somewhere past the twelfth hour, with the bottle finished:

"Can I say a thing," Kyra said, "that's going to sound stupid."

"Yes."

"Nobody told us there were two of them."

Val turned her head on the floorboards.

"Two of what?"

"Two — things." Kyra was frowning at the ceiling with enormous concentration. "There's the bond. Everybody talks about the bond. You get told about it when you're about nine, there are lodging requirements, there's a room and a parade and a hundred and forty people asking you if you're willing, and it is the most serious thing that happens to a person and I did it properly and I meant it."

"And?"

"And then there's the wanting," Kyra said. "And nobody mentioned it. Not once. Not my mother, not the house, not one of a hundred and forty people in a room. Everyone on this planet has known about it the entire time and they've all agreed not to say, and I got to twenty-two years old thinking that if you did the first one properly the second one came with it."

The lamp buzzed.

"It doesn't come with it," Val said.

"No. It does not come with it." Kyra let out a breath. "They're two different things and they can be in the same person and they can be in two different people and nobody tells you which you've got until you've already stood in a room and said yes in front of everyone you love."

Val lay on the floor and thought about a boy on a back step on the eighth terrace offering to take the blame, and a man three miles away in a pump house who had never once asked her a question about the sky place.

"I've never had both," she said.

"No."

"Have you?"

"No," said Kyra. "Not in one person. Not once."

They stayed there a while longer. Then Kyra got up and put the lamp out and they went to their separate ranges through the cold, and neither of them said anything else about any of it, and neither of them forgot a word.

— end of chapter five —

She found it in the eleventh week, in the wash room, with her back to a mirror and her head turned over her shoulder, and she stood there for a long time doing nothing at all.

It was low on her back, on the left, above the hip. It was about the size of a palm. It was not raised and it did not hurt and she could not feel it with her fingers, and it had not been there four days ago because she would have seen it four days ago.

The color was the trouble.

It was a soft grayish bloom with a paler center, and it had a specific quality that Kyra Davan had seen exactly twice in her life — once on a woman in the Solara wash room in her second year, who had been perfectly matter-of-fact about it, and once in a physiology text, in a figure captioned so blandly that she had turned the page without reading it properly.

It was what a body did after a cycle resolved without ceremony.

It was, in the exact and unmistakable language of her own species, the mark of the quiet.

She got dressed. That was the first thing she did, and it took her longer than getting dressed takes.

Then she sat on the edge of the bench in the wash room of the Solara range with her hands on her knees and did the arithmetic, and the arithmetic was very short and had only one answer in it.

One in eleven. Dermal, mostly. Pigment changes. Two of the eleven had something they could see afterward and one of those was permanent.

She had known. That was not in dispute and she was not going to permit herself the luxury of pretending otherwise for even a minute. She had read the literature, argued about the sample sizes, taken eleven days over it, and decided.

What she had not been able to imagine — what nobody could have told her, because nobody in that small bad literature had been Sethal — was what the something would look like.

Of all the marks a body could make.

She went to Deyn that night and made him look at it, and watched his face while he did.

"That's the thing," he said. "That's it. That's what the two cases had."

"Deyn."

"I'm sorry. I know that's not — " He sat back on his heels. "Are you all right? Does it hurt?"

"It doesn't hurt."

"Have you got one anywhere else?"

"No." She pulled her shirt down. "Have you?"

He said nothing for a second, and then he took his own shirt off, and turned, and there was one across his shoulder blade, smaller, browner, in the same soft-edged shape.

"Since the eighth week," he said. "I didn't tell you."

"You didn't tell me."

"No."

"Deyn—"

"I know. I know, and I've been sitting on it for three weeks and I've been furious with myself the entire time and I want to say the whole sentence, which is: I didn't tell you because I didn't want you to stop, and that is not a good enough reason, and I am sorry." He put his shirt back on. "There. That's the worst thing I've done."

Kyra stood in a cold room under a roof and found that she could not summon one single unit of anger about it, and understood exactly why, and hated that she understood.

"It's different for you," she said.

"It's on my back. Yours is on your back."

"It's not the same mark, Deyn." She heard her own voice go up and did not stop it. "Yours is a mark. On your world it's a mark. On this world mine is a — " She stopped, and started again, more level. "Do you know what it looks like?"

"You've said it's like something."

"It's like something."

So she explained the quiet to an offlander, at the twelfth hour, standing up, in a room with no heating, and it took considerably longer than she expected because there was no way to explain the procedure without explaining the parade, and no way to explain the parade without explaining what she had done at eighteen in front of a hundred and forty people, and no way to explain any of it without arriving at the fact that Kyra Davan had built her entire visible self on being the sort of person who stands up in a room.

"So anyone who sees it," Deyn said, slowly, "thinks you had a cycle and resolved it privately."

"Anyone who sees it thinks I took the quiet."

"But you're bonded."

"Which makes it worse."

He worked it through. She watched him do it and saw the moment he got to the bottom.

"Emrin," he said.

"Emrin."

Here is the shape of the box, which she constructed in her head over the following eleven days and could never afterward find a fault in.

She could not explain the mark without explaining Deyn.

She could not explain Deyn without unmaking the single most public promise she had ever made — in a room, in front of both families, in the Solveth house, to a man who had done nothing in four years but be good to her, and who was at this moment on the second terrace writing her a letter about a dog.

And she could not not explain it, because a mark on a body is a fact, and facts get seen. In a wash room. On a beach. By a physician at a bonding review. By a woman in a changing room after a training run.

Any Sethal who saw it would draw the obvious conclusion and would be kind about it, and would say nothing, and would think less of her forever in the specific way people think less of you when they believe you have done privately what you condemned publicly.

Which she had. That was the joke at the center of it. She had condemned it publicly, in the dark, in a north yard, in front of eleven people, to a girl sitting on a wall with a shoe in her hand.

A principle is a thing you stand next to.

She told nobody.

Not Emrin, obviously. Not her mother. Not the physician. Not Ilen.

Not Val, who was in a locked room in the west range eleven hours a day with her, who had lain on the floor with her at the twelfth hour and told her about a cabinet, and who had said, out loud, on that floor, that she had never had both in one person.

Kyra thought about telling Val perhaps forty times over the next month. She got as far as opening her mouth on two occasions.

What stopped her was not shame, exactly, and it was not fear of what Val would say.

It was that Val Sorin was the one person on Sethal who had actually done it — who had gone up a terrace to a room above a lamp shop at eighteen and come out into an ordinary afternoon and told nobody — and Kyra had spent four years knowing that about her and never once, not once in four years, asking her what it had been like.

She could not now go and say: I have something on my back that looks like yours, and I need to talk about it, and by the way I have never asked you about yours.

So she wore darker things, and did not swim, and changed with her back to the wall, and got very good at all of it very quickly.

She was the woman who would rather be seen entirely than be safe.

It took her about eleven days to become an expert in not being looked at.

— end of chapter six —

The submission dates for the Account came out in the twelfth week and Val began, at last, to empty the crates properly.

She had been putting it off. There was a version of the work you could do out of the top two-thirds of a crate — the clean logs, the reduced data, the notebooks she had kept deliberately well because she had always known other people would read them — and she had been doing that version for three months.

The bottom of the third crate had field notebooks in it. Under the field notebooks there was a canvas roll of sample tubes she had emptied on Thennet, and under that there was a sock.

She had known it was there every single day for eleven months.

She took it out and put it on the bench and sat down and looked at it.

M.V., in her own hand, in the small precise capitals she used on labels.

The room was empty. Kyra had gone down into the city for the evening, which she did more often now than she had in the ninth month and about which Val had drawn no conclusions whatsoever.

She thought about the disposal, which had taken most of an afternoon and had been intended to. She thought about reading nineteen labels out loud, one at a time, with Marenne Vey standing in the room because Marenne Vey had asked to be. She thought about three signatures on a manifest, and about the fact that the second of them was Kyra's, and that Kyra had signed it in good faith having watched a rack empty and having no earthly reason to count.

The correct action was available and took about four seconds to perform. There was a disposal chute at the end of the west range corridor and it went to the incinerator under the drive faculty and nobody would ever know that either.

Vaelith Sorin sat at a bench in a locked room and did not do it.

What she told herself — and she constructed it carefully, over about a quarter of an hour, and it held up beautifully — was that she would run it once.

Not to publish. Never to publish; that was not even a question, the provenance made it unusable and she had known that since the day she took it. Just to know. To close the thing in her own head that had been open since her second week on that plateau, when a woman of sixty had gone past two young athletes on a road at nine thousand feet without appearing to breathe.

She would run it, and she would look at the number, and then she would put the tube in the chute.

It would take an evening. Nobody would be harmed. Nobody would ever know.

Only far enough to know.

It took four evenings, because the equipment at the Vayr was better than anything she had improvised on Thennet and better equipment asks more questions.

On the fourth evening, at some hour she did not register, Val came off the stool and stood in the middle of the room with a sheet in her hand and had to put a hand on the bench.

It was not a small result.

The Vey had not simply adapted to altitude. That had been the assumption on the plateau and it was the assumption in the literature and it was wrong, or rather it was true and trivial and beside the point. What four thousand years of isolation had produced was a population whose cellular energetics were coupled — measurably, specifically, unmistakably — to the local bioelectric environment. They were not surviving Thennet. They were running on it.

Val sat down.

Because the other end of it was in another woman's notebook, on the bench four feet away, and had been for two years.

There's a bias in the local field. It's small. It's completely steady. And nobody has ever written it down.

Kyra's anomaly was not an anomaly. It was the other end of the same object. A field with a persistent unsourced component, and a population that had spent four thousand years learning to eat it.

Two years of separate work, done by two people in one prefabricated building, and the piece that closed it had been swabbed off the rim of a blue cup.

She did not put the tube in the chute.

She would think about that a great deal afterward — that there was a moment, that evening, with the sheet still in her hand and the room still empty, when it was all still recoverable. She could have walked eleven paces down a corridor. She could have gone home and slept and told Kyra in the morning and let the two of them decide together what to do with a thing that was theirs and had been obtained wrongly.

What she actually did was seal the sheet in a folder, put the folder at the bottom of the third crate, put the tube in her coat, and sit in the dark for a while.

She told herself she needed time to think.

She was extremely good at telling herself things and she had a lifetime of practice, and this one was, on inspection, entirely true. She did need time to think.

She simply had no intention of doing the thinking out loud.

— end of chapter seven —

The cross-country squad ran at six, as it always had, and in her fourth year Kyra Davan was captain of it, which surprised nobody except Kyra.

Val ran because she had run every morning for three years and had discovered that she could not stop. She was not on the squad. Rhone Tellis had graduated three years ago and the new captain had asked her twice and been refused twice, politely, and had eventually worked out that the refusal was not about the running.

So she went out with them and came back with them and did not race, which everybody found slightly eccentric and nobody questioned, because by the fourth year the two of them had accumulated the specific immunity of people who are good at something.

It happened on an ordinary morning in the fifteenth week.

The changing room in the north range was long and stone and cold, and at that hour it held eleven or twelve people, and there was steam and noise and somebody's boots on the bench and the ordinary loud shapeless business of thirty runners coming in out of the dark.

Val was pulling a dry shirt over her head. Kyra was four feet away with her back turned, doing the same thing.

And for perhaps a second and a half, in the gap between one garment and another, Val saw it.

She knew what it was instantly.

That was the whole of the problem and it was over before she could do anything about it. There was no interval in which she wondered. There was no moment of curiosity, no what's that, no reaching for an explanation.

Low on the back, on the left, above the hip. Soft gray with a paler center. She had seen it once before at close range, in a mirror, on the fourth terrace, above a shop that sold lamps, in an ordinary afternoon at twenty past three when she had come out feeling well.

Val turned away and finished pulling her shirt down and picked up her bag and walked out of the north range into the dark.

She got about forty yards up the path before she had to stop.

What she felt, standing on a cold path in the dark at the seventh hour, was not what she would have predicted.

It was not shock. There was some shock, briefly, and it went.

What arrived and stayed was a kind of terrible tenderness, so large and so unfamiliar that she had to stand still while it went through her.

Kyra had taken the quiet.

Kyra Davan, who believed in the room and the hundred and forty people and the whole four-thousand-year apparatus of being answerable, who had crouched in a north yard in the dark and said a principle is a thing you stand next to to a girl on a wall with a shoe in her hand — Kyra had gone somewhere alone and had it done privately and had told nobody.

Which meant she had needed to. Which meant something had happened.

And Val, standing on a path in the dark, built the rest of it in about four seconds, and it was coherent, and it was sympathetic, and it was wrong in every particular.

There was an offlander. Kyra had told her that herself, on a floor, in the west range. So: a cycle had turned, and it had turned in a woman who was bonded to a good man on the second terrace and in love with somebody else entirely, and there had been no version of walking into the Solveth house and asking Emrin to resolve it, and there had been no version of the other thing either.

So she had gone somewhere alone and had it done privately, and had come out into an ordinary afternoon, and had told nobody.

It fitted perfectly. That was the trouble with it. Every single piece fitted, and Val Sorin had spent her whole life being extremely good at building things that fitted, and it did not occur to her once in six weeks to go and check.

Which meant that at some point in the last four years, while Val was on a plateau or in a west range or lying on a floor at the twelfth hour talking about a broken cabinet, Kyra had been carrying the thing Val had carried at eighteen, entirely alone, and had said nothing.

And I didn't notice.

That was the sentence that arrived on that path, and it was the one that did the damage.

She did not ask.

She thought about asking. She had four separate opportunities that week and she rehearsed it each time and each time she took it apart before she got to the room.

Because here is what Val Sorin knew about being on the other side of that question, and she knew it better than anyone alive.

She knew that when Sarai Kest had said congratulations on a path in the east range, the ground had gone out from under her, and that it had not been Sarai's fault, and that she had never once managed to hold it against her. She knew that her father had asked one question — were you unwell — and that it had been the kindest available question and had still been unbearable. She knew that Novi had written one page and that the one page had been worse than eleven.

She knew, with total certainty, that if somebody had walked up to her in the ninth week of that year and said I saw your back, do you want to talk about it, she would have died on the spot.

Nobody had asked her. That had been the worst thing and also, she understood now, the only survivable thing, and both of those were true at once and always had been.

So she would not ask.

She would simply make certain that nobody else ever saw it.

That was a thing she could do. That was, in fact, the only thing on this planet she was actually good at.

She bought the concealer on the second terrace on a Fifthday, from a shop that sold theatrical supplies to the two playhouses, because a shop that sold cosmetics would have asked her what tone she wanted and she did not want to have a conversation.

The woman behind the counter sold her three shades and a sealant and explained how the sealant worked, and Val listened with the concentration she brought to a method paper.

She mixed the shades at the bench in the west range that evening, with Kyra four feet away arguing with a sheet of numbers, until she had the color exactly. It took her an hour and eleven minutes.

She tested it on her own arm and left it overnight and washed it in the morning and it did not move.

Then she put it in a small tin, and put the tin in the inside pocket of her coat, and carried it there every day for six weeks.

She did not have a plan. She wanted that understood, later, when there was a later.

She had a tin, and a coat, and she went to the north range at six every morning like everybody else, and she was ready.

— end of chapter eight —

Teris Marr was a third-year from Polaris who ran fourth for the squad and had a laugh you could hear from the second marker, and Kyra Davan liked her enormously.

That mattered afterward. It mattered a great deal, and it went on mattering for the rest of the year, because Teris had done nothing whatsoever.

It was a Thirdday in the twenty-first week. It had rained all night and the squad came in filthy and loud and the north range changing room was as full as it ever got, and Kyra came off the path last because a captain comes in last.

She was tired in the good way. She had run eleven miles and she had run them well and there had been a stretch on the upper section where she had felt, for the first time since the plateau, entirely like herself.

She was two-thirds of the way through changing, half-turned toward the wall out of a habit that had become so automatic she no longer knew she was doing it, when Teris Marr said her name.

"Kyra — the Ellory list, do you want me to—"

And Kyra turned around.

It was not a large movement. She turned from the hips to answer, the way anyone does, with a shirt in her hands and her back briefly toward the room.

Teris was four feet away and looking directly at her.

And Val Sorin crossed that room.

Kyra did not see her coming. That was the first fact and it was the one she came back to for years — that she did not see, that there was no approach, that the whole thing arrived from a direction she was not facing.

She felt a hand at her back, flat and warm and certain, and something cold, and a pressure, and she went rigid the way you do when somebody touches you unexpectedly in a public room, and her whole body turned in one motion and Val was there, closer than anyone had been to her in months, with two fingers against her back and an expression of absolute concentration.

"Sorry," Val said, to Teris, not to her. "Bit of grit. Off the path."

"Oh — do you want me to—"

"It's out." Val's fingers moved twice more. "Ellory list. She'll do it after."

"Right," said Teris Marr, and picked up her bag, and went.

Val stepped back.

It had taken, at the outside, four seconds.

Kyra stood in a changing room with a shirt in her hands and eleven other people in it and could not speak.

Val had already turned away and was doing up her own coat, unhurried, and she said, without looking up and in a voice pitched to carry no further than a yard, "It'll hold for two days. Water won't take it. If you need it off there's a solvent, I'll leave it on the bench."

Then she picked up her bag and walked out.

Kyra found her in the west range an hour and a half later.

She had spent that hour and a half doing an inventory of what she felt, because she was the sort of person who did that, and she had arrived at the range with the inventory half done and it went out of her head the moment she opened the door.

"How long have you known?"

Val, at the bench, did not turn round. "Fifteenth week."

"Fifteenth—" Kyra shut the door. "That's six weeks. That's six weeks, Val."

"Yes."

"And you've been carrying — what, you've been carrying that around? In your coat? Every day?"

"Yes."

"Since when?"

"Since about four days after I saw it." Val put down the pipette. She still had not turned round. "I mixed it in here. You were sitting where you're standing, arguing with the third season."

Kyra put both hands on the back of the chair in front of her and held on to it.

"Say something else," she said. "Don't stop there. Keep talking, because I can't work out what I feel and I need more information."

And Val turned around.

"She was going to see it," Val said. "Teris. She was four feet away and looking straight at you and you turned round, and in about half a second she was going to see it, and she would have been perfectly nice about it and said nothing at all, and by the eighth month it would have been in Polaris and by the eleventh it would have been everywhere, and it would never have come back to you and you would never have been able to answer it."

"I know what she'd have seen."

"I know you know."

"Then why didn't you—" Kyra's voice went and she brought it back. "Six weeks. Six weeks you've known and you didn't say one word to me."

"No."

"Why?"

"Because nobody asked me," Val said.

The room was very quiet.

"When I was eighteen," she said, "there was a period of about nine days when I would have gone into the sea rather than have a single person say the word to me out loud. My father asked me one question. It was the kindest question available and I have never got over it. Sarai said congratulations on a path and the ground went out from under me and it wasn't her fault and I couldn't hold it against her and I still can't." She was very still. Her hands were flat at her sides. "Nobody asked me what happened. That was the worst thing about that year and it is also the only reason I survived it, and both of those are true, and I have had four years to work out which one is truer and I still don't know."

"Val—"

"So I decided you'd tell me when you wanted to. And in the meantime I would make absolutely certain that nobody else on this planet ever saw it, because that is the one thing I know how to do." She stopped. "That's the whole of it. That's everything I've got."

And Kyra Davan stood in a locked room with her hands on the back of a chair and discovered that she had two entirely incompatible things in her chest and that neither of them would give way to the other.

Because it was the kindest thing anyone had ever done for her.

That was not in doubt. She had been half a second from a fact getting out into the world, and a woman who had spent six weeks preparing for exactly that half-second had crossed a room and closed it.

It had happened to her once before, and Kyra had been on her hands and knees on open turf in front of two thousand people at the time, and the woman who got her over the lip and out of sight had done it with a competence that frightened them both. She had never once, in four years, been anything but grateful for that morning.

This was the same hands. This was, as far as she could tell, exactly the same thing.

And somebody had put a hand on her body without asking.

In a room with eleven people in it. To hide a thing about her. Having decided, in advance, alone, over six weeks, with a tin in a coat pocket, that she would want it hidden.

"You didn't ask me," she said.

"I've just explained why."

"No. Not — " Kyra let go of the chair. "Not whether I wanted it covered. That's not — you're right about that, I'd have said yes, if you'd asked me in that room I'd have said yes, do it, quickly. That's not the thing."

Val waited.

"You never asked me what it was," Kyra said.

And Vaelith Sorin, who had spent six weeks in a state of enormous private tenderness, looked at her with total incomprehension.

"I know what it is," Val said.

Kyra opened her mouth.

And then she stood there, in a locked room in the west range, with the whole of it available — you don't, actually; it isn't that; it's an offlander and a small bad literature and eleven days of arithmetic and a boy under a roof who tells the truth even when it costs him — and she did not say any of it.

Not because she was afraid. Not because of Emrin, though there was that.

Because Val had just told her, without noticing she was doing it, that she had spent six weeks quietly grieving over a thing that had never happened, and to correct her now would be to take that away in one sentence, in a bad hour, in a room where they had both been shouting.

She would do it properly. Not today.

"All right," Kyra said.

"All right?"

"All right." She picked up her bag. "Thank you for the — for what you did. I mean that. And don't ever do anything like it again without telling me first, and I don't know how to have both of those in one sentence, so you'll have to take them as they are."

She got to the door.

"Kyra," Val said.

"What."

"There's solvent on the bench."

"I know," said Kyra Davan, and went out.

— end of chapter nine —

There was a morning in the twenty-third week that Val thought about for a very long time afterward, and nothing happened in it at all.

They had come in off the cliff path at the seventh hour and were walking up to the range, and Kyra was in the middle of an extremely detailed complaint about the Ellory course when Val said, without any preamble whatsoever:

"Did he do the thing?"

Kyra stopped walking.

"Fourthday," she said.

"Twice?"

"Val."

"It's a reasonable question. If it's load-dependent then—"

"You are not putting my private life in a method paper."

"I'd anonymize it," Val said, and Kyra shoved her sideways into a wall, and the two of them went up the path in the cold arguing about whether a sample size of one constituted anything at all.

Four words. That was all it took by then. Somebody who overheard it would have got nothing whatsoever out of it, which was rather the point, and neither of them noticed that they had built a language.

The custody board wrote to them in the twenty-fourth week, and the letter was two pages long and entirely reasonable, and Val read it three times standing up.

It was a form letter. That was the first thing. Every fourth-year presenting an Account that drew on off-world material got one, and it had been sent to eleven other people that week, and the woman who signed it had almost certainly not read the file.

What it asked for was what the Account required. Raw data, unreduced. Physical specimens, itemized, with provenance. Written authorization from the relevant holding for any biological material of local origin. A statement of method. A statement of consent.

And, because the fold program now sat under the Vayr and the board oversaw everything that came out of Thennet, a note that follow-up work in the field would be considered on the strength of the submission.

"That's fine," Kyra said, reading over her shoulder. "That's all fine, we've got all of that. The Ossen holding gave us written authorization for the biosphere survey in the first season, it's in the second crate—"

"For the biosphere survey."

"For the biosphere survey, yes, which is what we did." Kyra took the letter and scanned it again. "Val, what's the matter with you? This is a form. We're going to be the best-documented Account in eleven years."

"Yes," Val said. "We are."

Here is what Vaelith Sorin was looking at, and she assembled the whole of it in about ninety seconds and then spent four days confirming that she had not made an error anywhere.

The result was real and it was extraordinary and it could not be presented, because its provenance was a swab off a cup.

She could present the work without it. That was the obvious move and she examined it first. Take the field data, take Kyra's bias, put the two of them side by side, and stand up in that hall and say: here is a population that appears to be doing something remarkable, and here is a field that appears to have an unsourced component, and we cannot close the loop.

It would be a fine Account. It might be the finest of the year.

And in the questioning, which was the part that mattered and could go on for a very long time, somebody in that hall — and there would be nine people in that hall capable of it — would ask the obvious question. Have you tested Vey tissue?

And she would have to answer.

She had run the numbers on lying and had discarded it inside a minute, and not for moral reasons. Lying in the questioning was survivable exactly once and only if nobody ever checked, and the board had just asked for the specimen manifest.

The manifest.

Nineteen labels read out loud in a cold store on Thennet, one at a time, at Marenne Vey's request, while a rack emptied. A document certifying that all of it had been destroyed.

Three signatures. Marenne's. Kyra's. Hers.

Kyra had signed a false statement in good faith, having watched a rack empty, having no earthly reason to count, and it was on file with the Ossen holding and a copy of it was in the second crate eleven feet from where Val was standing.

The moment the theft came out, that document stopped being a formality and became the only relevant object in the room. And the woman standing next to Val in that hall would be a fourth-year with her name on a false disposal record, and every person present would have to decide whether they believed she had not counted.

Some of them would. Most of them, probably.

Not all of them, and not forever.

And then there was the last line of the letter, which was the one Val kept coming back to at the fourth hour of the morning.

Follow-up work in the field will be considered on the strength of the submission.

Because the result, if it came out, would not be a scandal. That was the thing nobody outside her own head would have believed. A scandal was survivable and small and about people.

The result was that eleven thousand human beings on a plateau four days away were, in the strict technical sense, the most interesting biological system in the Sethal system.

Val had spent two years on that plateau. She had watched a holding refuse a formal, courteous, properly submitted request for a physiological survey — no reason given, no route of appeal, four days, no — and she had accepted it and gone back to her lichen and had privately thought the refusal was custom rather than principle.

She knew better now. She had run a road in the cold to find out, and a woman had stood three feet off her shoulder for six hours because the rules of that road said neither of them could finish alone.

And she knew, with absolute clarity, what the board would do with a result like this and a plateau that had said no.

They would ask again. Politely. With funding attached. Repeatedly.

Ilen came up to the west range on the fourth evening, which was the worst possible timing and which he could not have known.

"I've read the abstract," he said, from the doorway, with his coat still on. "Kyra gave me the abstract. Val, the field component—"

"It's not finished."

"I don't care that it's not finished, I care that it's unsourced." He came in and sat on the good chair without being asked. "Do you know what an unsourced persistent field component means? It means there's a term in the local environment that isn't coming from the planet or the star, and I have spent two years reading a man who kept writing down that there was a term in his own numbers that wasn't coming from anywhere—"

"Ilen, that's not the same thing."

"It is almost certainly not the same thing," he agreed cheerfully. "It's the fourth time this year I've thought something was the same thing and it wasn't. But it's a beautiful piece of measurement and I want to say so before eleven other people say it in the questioning." He looked at her properly for the first time. "You look terrible. Are you sleeping?"

"I'm preparing an Account."

"Everyone's preparing an Account. You look like a person carrying a bag." He said it lightly and then, being Ilen, did not stop. "Is the biology sound?"

"The biology's sound."

"Then you'll be fine." He got up. At the door he paused, and turned, and said the thing that Val would think about at intervals for the following four hundred years. "You know the good part? The two of you did it clean. Two years on a closed plateau and you came home with a result and a holding that would have you back. Half the people in this faculty could not have managed that."

"Ilen—"

"I'm going. Eat something," said Ilen Vosse, and went.

— end of chapter ten —

She did it on a Secondday afternoon in the twenty-sixth week, and it took under an hour, and nobody stopped her at any point because there was no reason for anybody to.

The Vayr had a procedure for this. Of course it did; it had a procedure for everything, and a fourth-year withdrawing from a joint submission was so common in the weeks before the Account that the form had a name and the name was known to every student in the building.

You filed a separation. It required a statement of the reason, a signature, and the countersignature of a faculty member, and it was processed by an office on the ground floor of the east range by a man called Oren who had been doing it for thirty years.

Val had prepared two documents.

The first was a disclosure.

It ran to eleven pages and she had written it over three nights and it was, she thought, the most honest thing she had ever produced. It set out what she had taken, and when, and from whom, and how many. It set out the holding's written refusal, and the date of it, and the fact that she had read it and understood it. It set out the disposal, and the manifest, and the tube in the sock, and the four evenings in the west range, and the result.

It did not argue. There was one sentence of argument in eleven pages and it was I do not offer any of this as mitigation, and she had gone back and forth about even that.

It named her, and only her, on every page.

The second was the separation.

It withdrew Vaelith Sorin from the joint submission of Sorin and Davan. It assigned the entirety of the Thennet biological survey to her sole authorship and responsibility. It assigned the stellar chemistry and field measurement — Kyra's two years, Kyra's instrument rebuilt down to the housing, Kyra's bias — to Davan alone, as a separate and independent Account, unconnected, untouched, and clean.

The reason given was divergence of method.

Oren read it, stamped it, and said, "Bit late in the year for this."

"Yes."

"You want it dated today?"

"Please."

"Right you are," said Oren, and wrote the date, and put it in a tray, and that was the whole of it.

She sat on the steps of the east range afterward for a while.

The reasoning was not complicated and she had been over it for six days and every part of it held.

If the work stayed joint, Kyra's name sat next to a theft. Not a suspicion of one — a documented, disclosed, admitted theft, with a false manifest carrying her signature, and a fourth-year with that on her record in the year she took her Account would spend the next thirty years being a person about whom there had been something.

If the work came apart, Kyra had two years of impeccable stellar chemistry, an anomaly nobody could source, and the finest single measurement anyone at the Vayr had produced in a decade. She would give the best Account of the year. She would deserve it.

And the biology would go down with Val, which was correct, because it was Val's, and because the result would then be inadmissible and unpublishable and the board would have no eleven thousand people to go and ask politely about.

Everybody's interests were served. She had checked. She had checked repeatedly.

She sat on the steps and did not feel the way she had expected to feel, and it took her some time to identify what she was actually feeling, and when she did she got up and walked away from it.

It was relief.

Because Vaelith Sorin was not going to have to stand up in a hall in front of two hundred people and be questioned for as long as they felt like asking.

She had filed a disclosure instead. It was eleven pages and it was completely honest and it was going to cost her a great deal, and she would never once have to say any of it out loud with anybody looking at her.

She noticed that. She noticed it clearly, on the steps of the east range, and then she put it somewhere and went to find something to eat.

Her father came to the Vayr on the Fifthday.

She had not told him. He had heard within two days, the way he heard everything, and he came up the coast without writing and they walked the south path along the sea wall because he asked to.

"It won't go to the Assembly," he said, after a quarter of a mile. "I've made certain of it. It stays with the board, it stays academic, and there will be a finding and a sanction and it will be on your record and it will not be in a newspaper."

Val stopped walking.

"You've—"

"I've spoken to two people. That's all. Neither of them owes me anything and neither of them will remember doing it." Vaedom Sorin looked out at the water. "You'll be angry about that and you're entitled to be. I've thought about whether to tell you at all."

"You decided for me."

"I decided about a thing that was going to happen to my daughter, yes."

"Without asking."

"You'd have said no," said her father, simply, "and it would have been the wrong answer, and I would have done it anyway and then you'd have had that as well."

"What were the reservations?"

"Which reservations?"

"On the bill. You wrote that you had them and you didn't say what they were, and I have thought about it perhaps twice, and I would like to know."

Vaedom Sorin looked at the water for a while.

"I'm not going to burden you with them," he said.

They stood on the sea wall.

And Val, who had spent four days building an eleven-page disclosure and one form that took under an hour, stood next to a man who had just quietly rearranged her future for her own good without consulting her, and felt something rise in her chest that was so hot and so total that it frightened her.

"I would rather you hadn't," she said.

"I know."

"I would rather have had it as it fell."

"I know that too." He put his hand briefly on the side of her face, as he had done at the intake road when she was eighteen. "You may find that isn't the sort of thing one gets to choose."

Val did not recognize a single thing about the last four minutes.

She would recognize all of it, entirely and at once, in about eleven days.

She went down to the fourth terrace afterward, because there was nowhere else she wanted to be and she had run out of places to not be.

Novi listened to the whole of it standing at a bench with her hands in a bowl, because Novi had two small children and had long ago stopped doing one thing at a time.

At the end she dried her hands and said, "Was it a good letter?"

"What?"

"The disclosure. Eleven pages. Was it good?"

"It was accurate."

"That's not what I asked." Novi leaned back against the bench. "You've spent six days making a thing so that somebody else doesn't have to look at something. That's the whole of what you've described to me. And I want to tell you something and I want you to let me finish it, because you'll have an answer about halfway through and the answer will be quite good and I'd like you to hold on to it."

"Novi—"

"When you went to that room above the lamp shop," her sister said, "you decided that I shouldn't have to be in it. That was your decision. Not mine. And it was made out of love, I have never once doubted that, and it took me about four years to work out what it actually was."

"And what was it?"

"You chose what I was allowed to know." Novi picked the bowl back up. "That's all protecting somebody from something ever is. You decide they'd be better off not knowing and then you arrange for them not to know, and the arranging is a kindness and the deciding is not, and the two of them come in the same box and everybody only ever talks about the kindness."

The children were shouting at each other somewhere at the back of the house.

"You've been waiting to say that," Val said.

"Three years," said Novi. "It's better than it was. It used to have a bit about a coach in it."

— end of chapter eleven —

Kyra found out on a Fourthday morning in the east range, from a woman on the faculty who was being pleasant to her.

She had gone down to collect the submission schedule, which was pinned in the corridor outside the registry, and she was reading it with her bag on her shoulder when Serrin Alve came past with an armful of folders and stopped.

"Davan. Good — I was going to write to you." Serrin shifted the folders. "It's a lot to take on this late but I've looked at the field work and honestly I think you'll be better served alone. That measurement doesn't need anything next to it. It stands up on its own."

Kyra said, "Sorry?"

"The separation. You'll want a second reader now that it's a single Account and I'd be glad to do it, if you haven't already asked somebody." Serrin was smiling. She had taught Kyra in her second year and had liked her since. "I know it's disruptive. Divergence of method is the usual reason and it's usually nonsense, but in this case I have to say I think it's the right call — the biology and the chemistry were always going to be pulling against each other in the questioning."

The corridor was cold and full of people.

"When was it filed?" Kyra said.

"Secondday, I think. It's on the board." Serrin nodded at the wall. "Second column."

And then, because she was a decent woman with an armful of folders and eleven minutes before a lecture, she said, "Are you all right?"

"Yes."

"You've gone rather white."

"I'm fine. Thank you. Yes to the second reader." Kyra heard her own voice doing it — smooth, warm, entirely normal, the voice she used for the four questions about Thennet. "That's very good of you. I'll send it up this week."

"Good. Excellent." Serrin adjusted the folders. "It's a fine piece of work, Kyra. I mean that."

She went.

Kyra got about eleven paces down the corridor before Teris Marr came the other way with wet hair and a bag over her shoulder.

"Captain."

"Marr."

"Are you coming out on Fifthday? Because if you're not I'll take them up the north path and if you are I won't, because you always say the north path is a waste of a morning and you're wrong but I can't be bothered—"

"I'll be there."

"Good." Teris grinned at her, entirely open, entirely fond, twenty years old and utterly without malice. "You all right? You've gone a bit—"

"I'm fine."

"Right you are," said Teris Marr, and went off toward the north range.

Kyra stood in a corridor and thought, as she had thought perhaps forty times since a Thirdday in the twenty-first week: she has no idea. She was four feet away and she has no idea and she never will, and I am going to be pleasant to her for the rest of my life.

The board was in the second column and it had been there since Secondday, which was two days, which meant it had been read by every fourth-year in the building and by most of the faculty and by the porter.

Separation of joint submission. Sorin, V. / Davan, K. Filed Secondday. Reason: divergence of method.

Kyra stood in front of it for a while.

Then she read the rest of the column, because there was a part of her that was still functioning and it wanted the whole shape before she moved, and the rest of the column had four other notices in it and the last of them was an eleven-word line about a disclosure lodged with the custody board by a fourth-year of Polaris house.

It did not name her. Notices of that kind never named anybody.

It did not have to.

She did not go to the west range.

She went out of the east range and up the north path and out onto the cliff in the rain in the clothes she was standing in, and she walked for about a mile and then ran for four in boots, badly, until her lungs hurt enough to occupy her, and then she sat on a wall above the water and let it rain on her.

She was not, yet, angry.

What she was doing was assembling, and she could not stop, and every piece she picked up fitted the piece before it.

Val had known about the field bias for two years.

Val had gone quiet in the eighteenth week and had stopped arguing about the third season, which Kyra had put down to the Account.

Val had been sleeping in the range. Val had eaten almost nothing since the twenty-fourth week. Val had read the board's letter three times standing up and had said yes, we are in a voice Kyra had heard before, on a plateau, in a porch, four days before an old woman came up a road.

Val had crossed a changing room six weeks ago with a tin in her coat that she had spent an hour and eleven minutes mixing at the bench while Kyra sat four feet away arguing with a sheet of numbers.

Kyra sat on a wall in the rain and said, out loud, to nobody, in a voice that surprised her:

"She kept it."

— end of chapter twelve —

She came into the west range at the eleventh hour that night, soaked through, and Val was at the bench, and the first thing Kyra said was:

"Don't get up."

Val got up.

"Sit down," Kyra said. "Sit down, Val, I'm serious, because if you stand there doing the still thing I am going to say something I can't take back inside a minute and I'd like to get further in than that."

Val sat down.

"Tell me what you did. All of it. In order."

So Val told her. It took eleven minutes and it was complete and it was in order and she did not soften one line of it, because she had been assembling this account for six days and had known she would have to give it.

The tube in the sock. The four evenings. The result. The board's letter and the manifest and the specimen provenance and the last line about follow-up work. The eleven-page disclosure. The separation, filed on Secondday, dated at her request.

Kyra stood by the door and listened without interrupting once.

When it was over she said: "Why?"

"I've just—"

"You've told me what. I want why. Say it in one sentence and don't build me a case."

Val said, "Because your name was going to sit next to a theft."

"Right." Kyra nodded slowly. "Right. And whose name is it?"

"Kyra—"

"Whose name is it, Val?"

"Yours."

"Mine." Kyra came off the door. "It's mine. It's the only thing I've got that's entirely mine, it's the one thing in the whole of my life that nobody arranged for me, and you took it off a document with a form and a signature on a Secondday afternoon and it was filed and on a board for two days before I found out from Serrin Alve in a corridor. Serrin Alve. With her arms full of folders. Being nice to me."

"I was going to—"

"Don't."

"I was going to tell you—"

"Don't say when." Kyra's voice went off the walls. "Because I have spent eleven hours working out what the when was and it was never, Val. It was never. If Serrin hadn't stopped in that corridor you'd have let me walk into the twenty-eighth week thinking my Account was joint and you would have told me at some hour of your own choosing, when you'd decided I was ready, in a room you'd picked."

"I protected you," Val said.

It was the wrong sentence and she knew it while it was leaving her.

Kyra went very still, all of her, and slowed down.

"Say that again."

"I'm not going to say it again."

"No," Kyra said. "You should. You should say it again, because I want you to hear it in the room." She came another step. "You did not protect me. You removed me."

"That's the same—"

"It is not remotely the same thing and you have never once in your life been able to tell the difference." Kyra's hands were shaking and she let them. "You made me innocent. Without asking. You sat in this room for six days and you built a version of the next thirty years in which Kyra Davan did not know, was not involved, could not have counted, and then you filed it, and the astonishing thing, Val, the truly astonishing thing, is that you thought that was a gift."

"You didn't count. That's not a version, that's what happened—"

"I signed it!" Kyra shouted.

The room rang.

"I signed the manifest," she said. "I stood in a cold store and watched a rack empty and I put my name on a piece of paper that said all of it was gone, and it wasn't, and my name is on that document in the Ossen holding and it is going to be on it forever. That is mine. That happened to me. You do not get to go to an office on the ground floor of the east range and unhappen it."

"It would have ruined you."

"Then it would have ruined me."

There was a silence of some length.

"You think I don't understand what I'd have been giving up," Kyra said, quieter. "I do. I've had all day. I know exactly what a finding does to a person in their Account year and I know what it would have cost me and I have thought about it and the answer is still that it was mine to spend."

"That's easy to say now."

"It is not easy—"

"You'd have hated it," Val said. "You would have stood up in that hall with a finding on your record and been questioned about a false manifest in front of two hundred people—"

"YES."

It came out of Kyra like something breaking.

"Yes! I would have stood up in that hall! In front of two hundred people, with the worst thing I have ever put my name to, and answered for it, out loud, with everybody looking — and it would have been horrible, Val, and I would have been sick beforehand and I would have got through it, and afterward every single person in that room would have known exactly what I did and exactly what it cost and there would have been nothing left in me for anybody to find."

She was crying and she did not stop or wipe it.

"That's the whole of me," she said. "That's it. That's all I've ever had. I am not clever like you, I'm not — I have one thing, and it is that I will stand up in the room, and you have known that about me since a courtyard in our first week, and you took the room away."

Val said, "I didn't know it mattered that much."

And Kyra Davan laughed, one horrible sound, and sat down on the floor with her back against the door.

"No," she said. "No, you didn't. That's the true thing, isn't it. That's the actual true thing and it's worse than all of it."

She put her head back against the wood.

"Do you want to know when it started?" she said. "Because I've been assembling it since the sixth hour and I've got the whole thing now and I can do it in order.

"You went to the quiet on your own at eighteen and told nobody, and four people would have come at any hour, and one of them was your sister.

"You walked three miles across a plateau to a pump house for four months and I found out from the way you took your coat off.

"You took samples from people who had refused you in writing, for a year, and told me on the day you were caught and not one day before.

"You carried one home in a sock through a disposal you read out loud to a woman who asked you to.

"You saw something on my back and you decided, on your own, what it was and what I would want done about it and you did not ask me for six weeks.

"And now you have decided what I am allowed to lose."

She looked up.

"You did it in a locker room and I let you," Kyra said. "That's the part I can't get past. Not yours. Mine. I stood in this room six weeks ago and told you not to do it again without telling me first and then I thanked you, and you heard the thank you, and why on earth wouldn't you."

Val stood in the middle of the west range with her hands flat at her sides and did not go still.

That was the only thing about that night she was ever afterward able to be glad of. She did not go still. She stayed in it, and her voice was doing something, and she let it.

"I don't know how to do it any other way," Val said.

"I know."

"That isn't an excuse, I'm not offering it as—"

"I know what you're offering it as." Kyra wiped her face with the heel of her hand. "Val. I know you did it out of love. I want to say that once, out loud, so that neither of us can pretend later that I didn't. You did it because you love me and because you would rather carry it than watch me carry it, and I have known that about you since a hillside above a lake, and it is why I am sitting on this floor instead of somewhere else."

"Then—"

"It doesn't help," Kyra said. "That's the thing nobody tells you. It doesn't help at all."

She got up eventually. She was very tired.

At the door she stopped, with her hand on it, and said the last thing.

"The mark isn't the quiet."

Val's head came up.

"I was going to tell you properly," Kyra said. "I've been going to tell you properly for six weeks. I decided that night, standing here, that I'd do it in a good hour instead of a bad one, and I have been waiting for the good hour, and I want you to look at what waiting for the good hour has done to both of us."

"Kyra—"

"It's Deyn," Kyra said.

Val did not move.

"You've known his name since the night of the cabinet. You've known where he sits and what he studies and that he's four systems out, and I told you all of it lying on a floor in the west range, and then a few weeks later you saw something on my back and you did not put the two things next to each other. Not once. In six weeks."

"It looks like—"

"I know what it looks like." Kyra's hand was still on the door. "It's a dermal reaction. Two species close enough and not the same. There are eleven recorded cases in four hundred years, and I read every one of them, and he read them first and made me read them, and then I took eleven days over it and decided, and I would decide the same way again tomorrow."

"Kyra—"

"He told me the whole sentence," she said. "That's what I've never been able to explain to you about him. He said I would, and I have no right to decide it for you, and you should take longer than I did. He put the second half in. A boy of twenty-three, four systems from home, put the second half in without being asked, and I have known you since I was eighteen and I do not think you have said the second half of a sentence in your life."

She opened the door.

"You spent six weeks grieving for me," Kyra said, "over a thing that never happened, and you never asked, and I let you. So we're neither of us clean, and I'd like you to hold on to that, because I'm not going to be in a room with you for a while."

They gave their Accounts three weeks apart, in the same hall, to the same faculty.

Kyra Davan's was the finest of that year and the questioning ran two and a half hours, and when she came out of the hall Ilen Vosse was waiting in the corridor and picked her up bodily, and her mother cried, and Emrin had come up from the second terrace on the early coach and stood at the back where she would only see him if she looked.

Val gave hers in the twenty-ninth week, to a smaller hall, on the biology alone, with a finding already on her record and eleven pages lodged with the custody board.

It was, by every account of the four people who wrote about it afterward, extremely good.

Nobody asked her a single difficult question. That was the sanction, though nothing in the statutes said so. They let her finish early.

Val cleared the Marden room on the last Fifthday, which took under an hour, because it turned out that four years of a life fitted into two cases and a crate.

The last thing off the north windowsill was a kelith the size of her thumb, carved badly out of pale wood by a girl of sixteen who had never carved anything before or since, and who had enjoyed every minute of it, and who had not sent a note because she had known there did not need to be one.

It had sat there for four years. The wood had gone slightly darker on the side that faced the window.

Val stood in an empty room on the upper floor of the Polaris east range with it in her hand for rather longer than she had intended to, and then wrapped it in a shirt and put it in the crate with everything else.

They graduated in the same ceremony, in a hall full of eleven hundred people, in the same row, four places apart.

Neither of them crossed the room.

— end of chapter thirteen —

The first room had a table in it and a woman on the other side of the table with a file, and it was not the room Kyra had expected to be sitting in a year after her Account.

The bonding registry did not review often. It reviewed when something was raised, and something had been raised, and the something was that a physician at a routine examination had seen a mark on the lower back of a bonded woman of twenty-three and had done exactly what a physician is required to do, which was write it down.

"It isn't an accusation," the registrar said. "I want to be clear about that. Nothing here is an accusation."

"I understand."

"A resolved cycle inside a bond is a matter for the two of you and the lodging is a formality and frankly half of Aventhal is behind on theirs." She turned a page. "But it does have to be lodged, and there's no lodging on your file, and so I have to ask you the question and you have to answer it."

"It isn't a resolved cycle."

"Then what is it?"

And Kyra Davan sat in a small warm office on the third terrace and understood, with total clarity, what it was going to cost to answer that honestly, and who the only person alive was who could put anything at all beside her word.

She had not seen Val in fourteen months.

They had written twice each, and the letters had been about work, and both of them had been careful, and neither had said anything.

Val had taken a post at a coastal station eleven miles north of Hessen Point, which was not a step down exactly and was not a step anywhere either, and was the sort of place a person goes with a finding on their record. Kyra had gone to the observatory at Corran Vayr and had been offered a chair and had not yet said yes.

Kyra took the coach up on a Fifthday and walked the last mile because there was no other way to get there.

Val opened the door and said, "Oh."

"I need something," Kyra said. "And I'm going to say the whole thing standing on your step, because if I come in first I'll lose my nerve and dress it up."

"Kyra—"

"The registry's opened a review. A physician logged the mark. They want a lodging that doesn't exist or an explanation that does, and the explanation is Deyn Arrol, and if I give it to them then Emrin finds out in an office on the third terrace from a woman with a file, four years after I stood in his mother's house and said yes in front of a hundred and forty people."

Val had gone white.

"So I'm going to tell him myself first," Kyra said. "That's happening whatever else happens, it's tomorrow, I've written to him. But the registry wants something beside my word, and there is one person on this planet who saw that mark before I told anybody about it, and who can put a date on it, and who mixed a color for it at a bench for an hour and eleven minutes."

She made herself finish.

"I'm asking you to write a statement. And I know exactly who I'm asking and I know what you'll want to do with it, and Val — you will want to handle this. You will want to go to the registry yourself and be enormously competent at them. I am asking you for a statement of what you saw and when, and nothing else, and I need you to say out loud that you understand the difference."

The wind came off the sea eleven miles north of Hessen Point.

"I understand the difference," Val said.

"Say it properly."

"I will write down what I saw and when I saw it." Val's hands were flat at her sides. "And I will not do anything else. And if I think of something else to do I will bring it to you first."

Kyra let out a breath she had been holding for most of a mile.

"Right," she said. "Then can I come in? Because I've walked from the coach road and I'm about to fall over."

The second room was a diner on the Hessen road, three years later, and it was a mistake.

They had been writing. Properly, by then — every month or so, real letters, work and weather and Novi's second child and a long argument about a paper neither of them had written. It had been going well enough that meeting seemed obvious.

It was fine for about an hour and a half.

They talked about the observatory and the station and Ilen, who had been given a section and was terrifying eleven people who had once been his superiors. They talked about Emrin, carefully, because Emrin and Kyra had spent two years unmaking a bond and had come out the other side as something neither of them had a word for and both of them preferred to what they had been.

They did not talk about Deyn Arrol, who had gone home four systems out at the end of that year, and about whom Kyra had said one sentence in four years and would say one more in eleven.

She did tell Val about the chair. She had taken it in the spring — the observatory, the ninth of nine, exactly the position she had told a boy over a bowl she had no idea how to want.

"You said you didn't know what happened afterward," Val said.

"I didn't."

"And now?"

"Now I know what happens afterward," Kyra said. "You take the chair. You do the work. You get quite good at it and then you get very good at it and one day somebody younger than you asks what happens afterward and you find you still can't tell them."

She turned her cup around.

"He asked me that in the ninth month of our fourth year," she said, "and it took me five years to have an answer, and there is no version of the universe in which I get to give it to him."

Then Val said, "I sent the Ossen holding a copy of the finding."

Kyra put down her cup. "When?"

"Two years ago. It seemed right that Marenne should have it from me rather than—"

"Did you tell them the manifest was signed in good faith?"

A pause of about a second.

"I stated that you had not counted the rack."

"That isn't what I asked."

"It's the same—"

"It is not the same thing," Kyra said, and the woman at the next table looked over, "and you have been unable to hear the difference for eight years and I do not think you are ever going to hear it."

They finished the meal. They were extremely polite for the rest of it, which was the worst part, and they walked to the coach together and said the correct things.

And at the coach, in the last few seconds, with nothing left to say and the driver already turning the engine over, Val said:

"Does he still do the thing?"

She meant it kindly. It was, in fact, the only kind thing either of them had managed all afternoon — four words she had made up herself on a cold path in their last year, offered back now because it was the single piece of warmth she could still lay a hand on.

Kyra stood with one foot on the step of the coach.

"He went home," she said. "Four systems out. Four years ago."

Val did not say anything.

"I did tell you."

"You told me once," Val said.

"Yes." Kyra got up onto the step. "I suppose I did."

Then they did not write for a year and a half.

The third room was Val's, at the station, and Kyra had not been invited.

She came up on a Fifthday in the ninth month, unannounced, five years after the diner, and Val opened the door and stood there.

"I've brought nothing," Kyra said. "I want you to know that before you let me in. No occasion. I'm not asking you for anything and there's no review and nobody's died."

"All right."

"I just thought it was ridiculous."

Val stepped back from the door.

Val gave it to her that evening, and it filled a crate.

Every sheet from the four evenings in the west range. The original sample log with nineteen entries in her own hand. The tube itself, sealed, still labeled. The eleven-page disclosure and the board's finding and the sanction. The correspondence with the Ossen holding, both directions, including two letters from Marenne Vey that Kyra had not known existed and one that had never been answered. Oren's stamped separation form, dated at Val's request.

And a document Val had written over the previous four years and had not sent, which was an account — a complete one, with dates — of every decision she had made from the moment she picked a blue cup out of a sink to the afternoon she walked into an office on the ground floor of the east range.

Kyra went through it for three hours at the table without saying anything.

"What do you want me to do with it?" she said at last.

"I don't know."

"That's not an answer, Val, you always know—"

"I don't know," Val said. "That's the entire point of giving it to you. I have thought about what should happen to it approximately every day for nine years and I have four separate views and I am not going to tell you any of them, because if I tell you my view then you will be deciding about my view instead of about this."

She sat down opposite.

"It's yours," Val said. "Burn it. Publish it. Send it to the board or to Ossen or to nobody. Put it in a drawer and never open the drawer. I will support any of those and I will not argue and I will not be hurt, and if you want to take a year over it, take a year."

Kyra looked at her for a long moment.

"You've been practicing that."

"For about four years."

"It shows a bit."

"I know," Val said. "I'd rather it showed than not exist."

And Kyra Davan put her hand flat on a crate of paper on a table eleven miles north of Hessen Point and did not say anything for a while, because there was nothing to say that would not have been smaller than the crate.

The fourth room was the overlook on the second terrace, which is not a room, and it was seven years after that.

They were on the same bench they had used since the year Kyra took the chair at the observatory, and Val had come down from the north for the eighth month, and the bay was doing the thing where it moved.

They were thirty-eight.

A very great deal had happened in sixteen years and almost none of it had happened to them. Ilen Vosse ran the drive faculty and was worse than ever. Vaedom had lost a seat and won it back and had begun, in the last year, to write letters that were four pages long. Novi had three children, and the eldest of them was old enough to be rude about Val's coat, and that was the thing that actually marked the time — not anybody's face. Children arrive. Nothing else on Sethal does you the courtesy of showing you where you are.

Kyra had her hair tied back and coming loose out of it, as she had on a staircase in Aventhal at eighteen with a bag on her shoulder. Val sat with her hands flat and still on her knees, which was how she sat, and had been since a waiting room on the fourth terrace with eleven chairs in it and a window that looked at the roof of the building opposite.

Nothing about either of them had changed in any way a stranger could have named.

Nothing would, for a very long time.

They had been talking about nothing for an hour, which they had got extremely good at.

And then Val put down her cup and said:

"I've been offered something."

"Mm."

"I haven't answered."

Kyra turned her head.

It took her a moment to work out why that sentence had arrived like a stone in still water, and then she had it, and she sat very carefully with it for a second or two before she said anything at all, because it seemed important not to get this wrong.

Twenty years. And in twenty years, Vaelith Sorin had never once brought her a decision that was not already made.

"All right," Kyra said.

"That's it. That's all I've got. I haven't decided and I don't know when I will and I'm not going to tell you what it is yet because I haven't got it straight."

"All right."

"You're not going to ask?"

"No," said Kyra Davan.

And that was the hardest thing she did that decade, and neither of them remarked on it.

They sat on a bench above the water. Down the hill the harbor was doing what the harbor did. Out past the headland, nine miles south, a ship went up from Hessen Point without any sound at all, and rose for a few seconds, and then was not rising, and then was not there.

Neither of them looked at it.

Nobody ever did.

— end of book three —