The transport rattled down the basalt slope, its tracks chewing through a crust of vitrified ash that crunched like black sugar under the wheels. Senna Vex braced one palm against the cold interior wall and counted the seconds between the engine's labored surges. Eight. Eight seconds of motion, then a pause where the whole vehicle seemed to hold its breath before lurching forward again. She had stopped breathing in rhythm with the machine somewhere around the third hill, when the road gave up being a road and became a suggestion written in old tire tracks and animal bones.
The interior stank of old rubber, machine oil, and the faint metallic bite that never quite left the air downwind of the smoldering ridges. Her throat remembered it before her lungs did. She had grown up on that smell, then left it behind, then been dragged back to it like a dog on a chain.
The man beside her, Idris Roen, did not look up from the datapad balanced on his knee. His thumb moved in small, precise strokes, annotating something she could not see. The light from the screen carved his face into planes: the hollow of one cheek, the ridge of a brow, the silver stubble along a jaw set in the particular stillness of someone accustomed to bad news.
"You've been quiet since the gate," he said.
Senna did not turn her head. Through the slitted viewport the wastes rolled past in shades of graphite and dull amber, a long smear of cooled lava interrupted by the pale fingers of petrified timber reaching up from a dry riverbed. "Quiet's a resource out here. You spend it too early and you have nothing left when it counts."
A beat passed. Roen's stylus paused mid-stroke.
"That sounded rehearsed."
"Maybe."
Another hill. The transport groaned, settled, kept going. Somewhere in the cargo bay behind them a child coughed, and a woman's low voice murmured something that might have been a song or might have been a prayer. Senna had stopped being able to tell the difference years ago.
The road curved around a spine of obsidian that caught the low sun and threw it back in broken coins of light across the viewport. For an instant her own reflection hung there, superimposed over the wasteland: a woman in her thirties, hair shorn close, the scar that ran from her left temple to the corner of her mouth pulling the skin tight when she did not school her face into stillness. She had been pretty once, in the way that people who trusted the world were pretty. Now the trust had been scoured away, and what remained was something leaner. Something she did not entirely recognize.
She had come back because of her brother.
She had come back because she had left him.
"We should talk about the assignment," Roen said.
"No."
"Blackwing needs a scout who knows the southern basins. The terrain shifts weekly. Most of our people can't tell a fresh flow field from a six-month-old one. You've spent the last four years moving through that ground."
"I've spent the last four years trying not to think about that ground."
"Nevertheless."
Senna finally turned her head. Roen met her gaze without flinching. He had the kind of eyes that took in information the way a camera took in light: cleanly, without sentiment. She had known commanders like that before. She had also known what they became when the information turned ugly.
"Blackwing," she said. "Tell me about it."
Roen set the datapad down on the seat between them, screen dimming. "Two operatives. Field. Mags. Field is what we used to call a Resonant. Mags is the mechanic and convoy quartermaster, has been with us longer than most of the doctrine we've been forced to write. She doesn't trust the doctrine. She doesn't trust much of anything that can't be fixed with a wrench and a length of copper wire."
"And the squad's mandate?"
"Probe. Map. Listen. The Feral Resonant Colony has been moving closer to the southern perimeter for the last three weeks. We need to know why. We need to know whether they're moving toward us or away from something else."
The transport hit a depression that might once have been a streambed. The shock ran up through the floor plates and into Senna's teeth. She waited for the vehicle to settle before she spoke again.
"You want me to walk into the path of something that thinks on a wavelength none of your instruments can parse, with a woman who doesn't trust doctrine, on the word of a commander I met four hours ago."
"I want you to do exactly that."
"Why me?"
"Because your brother is out there."
The words landed in the cabin the way a stone lands in still water, sinking, sending out rings. Senna's mouth thinned. The scar along her cheek pulled taut.
"Don't," she said.
"Cage Vex. Last confirmed ping was eight days ago, in the lower basin, near the southern perimeter. He was moving with a Resonant signature that suggests he is, for the moment, coherent. For the moment, alive."
"I said don't."
"Senna." Roen's voice softened, not in pitch but in weight. "You left him. I know that. He knows that. The convoy knows that. You have carried it the way other people carry wounds. I'm not here to open it again for cruelty. I'm here because Blackwing is the only squad with a chance of reaching that basin and bringing something back. And you are the only scout I have who knows that ground and can be trusted not to panic when the air itself starts singing."
The transport rolled on. Outside, a column of steam rose from a fissure in the basalt ahead of them, backlit by the low sun, casting a long bruised shadow across the road. The child in the cargo bay had stopped coughing. The woman had stopped singing. The silence pressed against the viewport like a hand.
Senna looked down at her own hands. They were rough, the knuckles scarred, the nails trimmed short. They had killed. They had carried her brother out of a burning shelter when he was seven and she was twelve, his small body limp against her chest, his breath a thread she had thought would snap before they reached the perimeter. They had let go of him, later, in a different way. They had signed a form. They had walked away.
She had walked away.
She looked up.
"I'll need to meet them before I commit."
"Already arranged." Roen picked up the datapad again. "Field will be waiting at the second relay post, about two kilometers in. Mags is there now, arguing with the generator."
"Arguing."
"Verbally. Loudly. With feeling."
Senna almost smiled. Almost. The muscles remembered the shape but did not complete it.
"Pull over here."
Roen raised an eyebrow. "Here?"
"I need to walk the last bit. I need to clear my head."
He studied her for a long moment. Then he tapped twice on the partition behind him. The transport slowed, shuddered, and rolled to a halt on a stretch of flat basalt beside a rusted signal tower that leaned at an angle no engineer would have approved. The door hissed open. A breath of cold mineral air poured in, carrying the taste of sulfur and old rain.
Senna swung down from the cab, boots crunching on the glassy surface. She stood for a moment with her hand on the door, looking back at Roen.
"If this is a trap," she said quietly, "if you've brought me back here for any reason other than Cage, I will find a way to make you regret it."
"I believe you," Roen said. "That is one of the reasons I asked for you."
The door closed. The transport pulled away, its engine fading into the vast hush of the basin. Senna stood alone on the basalt with the wastes opening before her in every direction, a crumpled map of old fire and older grief.
She began to walk.
The second relay post squatted on a rise half a kilometer ahead, a prefab structure bolted to a slab of poured concrete, its walls patched with composite sheeting and something that looked like recycled hull plating. A wind turbine on the roof turned in a desultory half-circle, complaining softly to itself. Cables ran from the post down into a trench and out toward the southern perimeter, vanishing into the haze.
As she approached, a voice drifted out from beneath the turbine housing. It was high, reedy, and deeply indignant.
"You absolute disgrace of a machine. I have fed you grease. I have bled for you. I have whispered kind things into your housing when no one was watching. And you choose now, today, with guests incoming, to develop a disposition."
A second voice answered it. Lower. Warmer. Carrying the patient cadence of someone who had long ago made peace with the absurd.
"Perhaps the turbine is tired, Mags."
"Tired. Tired. The turbine is a piece of nineteenth century salvage bolted to a post by a man who is no doubt currently warm and well-fed in some basement. It does not get tired. It gets neglected. And I will not have neglect in my relay post."
Senna stepped around the corner of the turbine housing and looked down into the small repair pit dug beside the post's foundation. An elderly woman stood hip-deep in the open machinery, a wrench in one hand and a small, dirt-blackened flashlight in the other. Her hair was a wild gray nest pinned back with what appeared to be a spark plug. Her coveralls were patched at both knees with what might have been seatbelt webbing. Her face, when she looked up, was a map of creases and old burns, the kind of face that had decided long ago to be amused by the world and had not revisited the decision since.
"Well," Mags said. "You're the new scout."
"Senna Vex."
"Mags. Don't tell me your last name. Don't tell me your backstory. Don't tell me you have a complicated relationship with command structures. I have heard that sentence four times this month and the words have started to lose their meaning."
Senna blinked. "I wasn't going to say any of that."
"Good. Then we might get along. Hand me that three-eighths socket before you do say any of it."
Senna picked the socket out of the toolbox on the edge of the pit and passed it down. Mags accepted it with a grunt of approval, her fingers finding the bolt by feel alone.
"He's around the back," Mags said, not looking up. "Field. The big resonant. You'll know him when you feel him. Try not to flinch. He gets his feelings hurt."
"His feelings?"
"I am not joking. He once sulked for three days because a child told him his harmonic was ugly. Three days. Whole southern ridge went quiet. Birds left. I'm not saying it was related. I'm not saying it wasn't."
Senna looked toward the back of the relay post. There was nothing visible there. Just the same basalt slope, the same haze, the same low light. She could not have said why her skin prickled.
"You coming?" Mags asked.
"Yes."
"Then move. I've got a turbine to murder and I prefer to do it without an audience."
Senna stepped around the relay post's rusted housing and stopped. The air here tasted different. Metallic, yes, but layered beneath the iron was something sweeter, almost organic, like the inside of a seashell held to the ear. The basalt beneath her boots hummed.
Not vibrated. Hummed. A low B-flat that settled behind her sternum and refused to leave.
"You are the one who carries him," said a voice that was also a wind, also a creak of cooling stone, also the faint whine of a tuning fork struck against her clavicle. "I felt you coming from the eastern berm. You bend the air strangely."
Senna's hand went to the holster at her thigh before she caught herself. There was nothing to aim at. The voice came from everywhere and nowhere, and the basalt slope ahead rippled like the surface of a black pond disturbed by a single drop.
"I don't carry anyone," she said.
"You do. You carry a shape in your chest where a brother used to fit. I have felt its edges every time you have passed within three kilometers of my range. It has a name. I will not speak it unless you wish it spoken."
The slope stilled. A figure resolved from the rock and the heat shimmer, though calling it a figure was generous. It was more like the suggestion of one, a density in the air roughly human-shaped, its edges flickering between solid and translucent. Where a face might have been, there was only a softer darkness, and within that darkness, points of light that drifted like embers rising from a fire that had burned for centuries.
"I am called Field," the phenomenon said. "This range is my body. That ridge is my shoulder. The thermal vents to the south are, in a manner of speaking, my breath. You have questions. I can taste them on you like salt."
Senna exhaled slowly. Her tactical training had prepared her for many things: ambushes, betrayals, the particular silence that preceded a kill. It had not prepared her for a conversation with a hillside.
"Cage Vex," she said. The name came out rougher than she intended. "My brother. He flew a Mark Nine interceptor. Call sign Ghostbird. He was reported lost in the pyroclastic surge during the Ashwave Event, sector fourteen, four years ago."
"I know the shape you mean."
Senna's breath stopped. "You knew him?"
"I know the absence where he used to be. I felt him burn. I felt his ship come apart. It was a bright thing, very bright, and then it was not. I held the heat of it in my body for eleven days." A pause, and the air around her grew warmer, as if in demonstration. "I did not know him. I knew the space he occupied. There is a difference."
"What difference?" The question came out sharper than she meant.
"Knowing a space is immediate. It requires only attention. Knowing a person requires time, and time requires trust, and trust requires that they remain." The embers in the darkness pulsed once. "He did not remain. But pieces of him did."
Senna's throat closed. She forced words through it anyway. "What pieces?"
"Come. I will show you, but I will not carry you there. That is a journey you must choose with your own legs."
The figure dissolved back into the slope. The hum in the basalt shifted, guiding her westward, away from the relay post, toward a ravine that gaped in the terrain like a wound.
She followed.
The ravine was a junkyard. Skulls of vehicles, hulls of hab-units, the twisted bones of freighters, all half-buried in ash and basalt flow. The heat was oppressive, a wet blanket pressed against her skin. Steam rose from vents between the wreckage, carrying the smell of sulfur and older things, rust and coolant and the faint sweet rot of organic matter long since cremated.
"Training dives," Senna said, half to herself, half to the air. "Idris's people come here to learn how to read wreckage. To find survivors in collapsed structures. This is where he sent the new scouts."
"Yes." The voice came from a vent to her left. "They learn to be calm inside other people's endings. It is a useful skill."
"It's a grim one."
"Grimness is a kind of honesty." A pause. "Your brother's ship broke apart at the third shelf of this ravine. The nose section traveled further than the rest. It lodged against a hab-frame from an older wreck, a cargo hauler, I think, that died here long before he did."
Senna moved deeper. Her boots crunched on shattered glass and she registered the sound the way her training had taught her: data, not emotion. Each step was a placement. Each placement was a choice. She was choosing to be here. She was choosing this.
The nose section of a Mark Nine interceptor emerged from the haze like a drowned thing rising from black water. The cockpit canopy was gone. The flight seat was still bolted to its frame. Around it, frozen in place by four years of thermal cycling, were the fragments of instruments, wiring, the tatters of a flight harness.
She stopped three meters away. Her hands were shaking and she let them shake.
"There is something inside," Field said, closer now, the voice almost inside her ear. "Behind the seat back. A cylinder, no larger than your forearm. It is still intact. I have kept the heat away from it as best I could. I do not know what it contains. I only know it hums at the same frequency you do."
Senna moved forward. Her fingers found the seam behind the seat back. Metal scraped against her knuckles and she felt the skin split, warm blood running into the crease of her hand. She did not stop.
The cylinder came free. It was a standard survivor beacon, military grade, brushed steel scarred by heat. A manual release. Of course. Cage had always distrusted automated systems. He had once told her that anything which decided for itself when to speak was not worth listening to.
She held the cylinder in both hands. It was heavier than it should have been.
"It will not activate by itself," Field said gently. "He did not trust self-starting things. You must turn the base clockwise until it clicks."
She turned it. The mechanism resisted, then yielded with a small, definitive snap.
The voice that came out was not Field's. It was thinner, younger, stripped of the harmonics that Field wove through the air. It was her brother's voice, captured in a loop, preserved in the indifferent amber of a survivor beacon's memory core.
"This is Ghostbird, Cage Vex, call sign confirmed. Time stamp, oh-four-twelve, mission cycle seventeen. If you're hearing this, I'm either dead or close enough that the difference doesn't matter."
Senna's knees did something complicated and she let them. She sat down on the ash beside her brother's wrecked cockpit, the cylinder in her lap, her brother's voice spilling out into the sulfurous dark.
"Pell thinks the Council's going to scrub the Directive if we don't get back with the resonance data. I think Pell's half right and half wrong. The Council doesn't scrub things. They archive them. They bury them in a basement somewhere and pretend the basement doesn't exist. I've seen the archives. I went looking once, after they told me the Ashwave projections were overstated. They weren't overstated, Senna. They were understated by a factor of three, and someone in that building knew it, and someone in that building decided not to say."
A sound on the recording, the pop of static, what might have been a laugh or a cough.
"I'm going to bring the data back. I'm going to make them look at it. If they don't, I'll put it somewhere they can't bury. I don't know where yet. Maybe I'll find a resonance that doesn't care about classified stamps. Maybe I'll find a sister who knows how to keep things."
Senna pressed her forehead against the cylinder. The metal was warm. Field had kept it warm. The voice continued, stubborn, recording everything her brother had been too proud to say in life.
"Tell Mags I was right about the harmonic coupler. Tell Idris I'm sorry I called him a bureaucrat in front of the convoy. I was wrong about him. He's not a bureaucrat. He's a coward, but he's a coward who keeps people alive, and that counts for more than I wanted to admit."
A longer pause.
"And Senna. If this is the one you hear, the last one, I want you to know I never blamed you for the extraction. I blamed myself for letting you go in first. I should have gone first. I should have taken the hot door. It was my job. I let you take it because I was scared and because you never said no. That's on me. Not on you. Remember that. Not on you."
The recording clicked off. The silence it left was the loudest thing Senna had ever heard.
Field did not speak. The embers in the air dimmed to a faint glow, as if in respect. The hum in the basalt dropped to a register so low it was almost inaudible, a frequency meant for grieving rather than listening.
Senna sat with the cylinder in her lap and the ash cold under her and the world arranged itself, slowly, into a new shape. Cage had known. He had known the Council would bury it. He had recorded everything anyway, in case anyone came looking. In case she came looking.
Four years. Four years she had carried the weight of the extraction, the weight of the door she had gone through first while her brother covered her from behind. Four years she had worn that weight like a second skeleton, and all that time, his voice had been here, sealed in steel, three kilometers from a relay post where a woman named Mags was murdering a turbine and pretending not to care about anything.
"The Council scrubbed his black box," Senna said, and her voice was steady, which surprised her. "He said it in the recording. Pell knew. The data was supposed to come back with him. Instead the Council filed the whole mission as inconclusive and buried the projections in an archive somewhere."
"Yes." Field's voice was soft, the harmonics stripped down to their gentlest layer. "I felt them come for the wreck, two weeks after he fell. They came in unmarked vehicles. They took the standard beacon. They took the flight recorder. They left the survivor cylinder because it was manual release and they did not think to look for manual release. Or perhaps they did look and chose not to take it. I do not know which possibility is worse."
"The second one," Senna said. "The second one is worse."
"Yes. I think so too."
She stood. The ash fell from her knees. The cylinder she kept in her hands, held close to her body, the way one holds a child who has been lost and found.
"I need to take this to Idris."
"He will ask you what you want him to do with it."
"I know."
"He will ask you if you understand what it will cost."
"I know that too."
"Then I will not slow you." The slope behind her brightened, just slightly, a path through the haze illuminated by the faint glow of the embers. "Go quickly. The light I make for you will not last long, and the ravine does not love strangers after dark."
The path Field had made for her was almost beautiful, in the way a scar is beautiful when it has healed clean. Senna followed it down the slope, her boots sinking in ash that gave way under her weight like old snow. The survivor cylinder rode in her pack now, a cold weight against her spine, and the warmth of it through her shirt felt like an accusation.
Mags was waiting at the maintenance alcove where the convoy was camped. The old woman had dragged a tarp across the mouth of the alcove and rigged a light from a spliced battery and a bulb she had probably stolen from somewhere she refused to name. She sat on an ammunition crate, a wrench in one grease-black hand, and did not look up when Senna ducked under the tarp.
"Took you long enough," Mags said.
"Field wanted to explain some things."
"Field wants to explain all things. Field is a geological feature with opinions." The wrench turned. Something metal clinked against something else metal. "You eat yet?"
"No."
"Figured." Mags jerked her chin toward a sealed container on a crate. "Protein block. Tastes like a boot that's been left in the sun, but it'll keep your hands from shaking."
Senna picked up the container. Did not open it. Her hands were shaking anyway.
"Mags."
"Hmm."
"I need to get into the restricted archive on the lower tier."
The wrench stopped. Mags looked up then, and her face in the spliced light was all hollows and hard edges, the map of a life lived in places that did not forgive mistakes.
"The archive," Mags repeated.
"Yes."
"The archive Idris keeps locked because half of what's in there would start a war if the wrong people read it."
"Yes."
"The archive that requires Council authorization to enter, which Council doesn't exist anymore because Idris dissolved it after the Second Ash, which means authorization is now Idris, which means you're asking me to help you get past a man I respect, into a room he keeps locked, so you can look at things you have no business looking at."
Senna said nothing.
Mags set the wrench down. She picked up a rag and wiped her hands, slow and deliberate, the way she did everything when she was thinking.
"Tell me why."
"Dr. Pell recorded something before he died. The Council buried it. I need to see what else they buried with it."
"Pell's dead, girl. Has been for thirty years."
"I know."
"And you're going to break into Idris's archive because a ghost on a tape told you the truth got filed somewhere."
"Yes."
Mags studied her for a long moment. The spliced light buzzed. Outside the tarp, the wind moved ash across the ground in long slow drifts.
"Your brother," Mags said.
It was not a question. Senna did not answer it.
"Cage."
Still not a question.
"He left with Pell's expedition," Senna said. "I was supposed to be on that mission. I traded out at the last minute because I had a fever, or pretended to, and they sent him instead because he was young and stupid and I told him it would be fine." She swallowed. "He was twenty. He told me he wanted to make me proud."
"Senna."
"I am not going to sit here and tell you how I feel about it. I am telling you I need to get into that archive, and I am telling you I cannot get there without help, and I am telling you that if you say no I will find another way and that other way will probably get me killed."
Mags put the rag down. She stood. Her knees popped, a sound like small-caliber fire in the close space.
"I am not saying no," Mags said. "I am saying you are a fool. There is a difference. Come on."
The lower tier of the convoy's temporary fortress was built into the leeward side of a basalt ridge, the kind of stone that the ash had cut into knife-edges over centuries. Mags led her down a service passage that smelled of old coolant and the faint mineral tang of water recycled too many times. The passage ended at a hatch with no handle, just a seam in the metal and a small panel that flickered when Mags tapped it with a knuckle.
"Don't ask how I know this code," Mags said. "I will lie to you, and we will both be embarrassed."
The hatch sighed open. The archive beyond was smaller than Senna had expected, a low room lined with sealed cases, each one stamped with the faded insignia of a research collective that no longer existed by any name the wastes recognized. Mags did not follow her in. Mags leaned against the corridor wall and crossed her arms.
"You have ten minutes," Mags said. "After that the patrol cycle brings a tech through here, and I cannot explain why I am having a heart attack at my age."
Senna stepped inside. The air was cold and tasted of recycled nothing, the kind of atmosphere that had been breathed and cleaned and breathed again until all trace of weather had been pressed out of it. Her eyes adjusted. The cases were labeled in a hand she did not recognize, precise and small.
She found Pell's file in the third stack. The case was heavier than it looked. Inside, beneath a thin layer of desiccant that crumbled at her touch, were data wafers, a folded paper manifest, and a single image plate, the old kind that had to be held up to a light to be seen.
She held it to the room's single bulb.
The vessel on the plate was a long, scarred gunship, the same class she had grown up watching at the landing field outside the settlement where she and Cage had been raised. The class had a name once, something technical and forgettable, but every pilot who flew one called them Wolves because of the way the engine housings flared at the rear. Pell's ship had been called the Ardent. This one was not the Ardent. The hull number was different. The configuration of the sensor pod on the dorsal strut was different. But the class, the make, the line of it, was identical.
It sat in a Directive hangar. The Directive insignia was on the bulkhead behind it. The hangar was clean, pressurized, lit by the kind of overhead panels that only worked when the grid was fully online. The hangar had not seen the ash that covered everything outside.
The timestamp on the image was thirty years old. The ship had been sitting there for thirty years, untouched, unrusted, unmoved, while Pell's black box sat in a classified file in a room nobody was supposed to enter.
She heard Mags shift in the corridor.
"Senna. Time."
"One minute."
"You don't have one minute."
"Thirty seconds, then."
She looked again. The image was clear. The ship was whole. The hangar was whole. There was no damage to the hull, no scorch pattern, no indication that this vessel had ever been exposed to the thermal event that supposedly killed its pilot. It looked like a thing that had been parked and forgotten, not a thing that had fallen out of the sky.
"Senna."
She put the image plate in her pack, beside the survivor cylinder. She put the wafers in her jacket. She left the manifest because the manifest would be missed and the rest might not be, and she did not want them to know yet what she had seen.
Mags pulled the hatch shut behind her. The seam vanished. The corridor looked like a corridor again, untouched, uninteresting, just another service passage in a fortress built to outlast the next catastrophe.
Neither of them spoke until they were back at the maintenance alcove, under the tarp, with the spliced light buzzing its single complaint.
"Well?" Mags said.
Senna set her pack on the ammunition crate. She did not open it. She looked at Mags, and Mags looked back, and the old woman's face did something complicated that Senna had never seen it do before, a softening at the edges of the mouth that was not quite a smile and not quite grief.
"You found something," Mags said.
"I found something."
"Are you going to tell me what?"
"Yes."
She told her. The ship in the hangar. The timestamp. The hull that had not burned. The hangar that had not failed. The class of vessel that matched the ship Cage had flown out of the settlement on the day he did not come back.
Mags listened without interrupting, which was a thing Mags almost never did. When Senna finished, Mags picked up the wrench again, turned it once in her hand, and set it down.
"Thirty years," Mags said.
"Yes."
"That ship has been sitting in a hangar for thirty years while his wreck was out in the field burning."
"Yes."
"And Pell's data was filed as inconclusive, and the beacon was taken, and the flight recorder was scrubbed, and your brother's name was on a list that got handed to Idris when he took over, and Idris never said a word about any of it to anyone."
"I don't know what Idris knew. I don't know what anyone knew."
"But you intend to find out."
"Yes."
Mags nodded, slow, the nod of a woman who had survived three catastrophes and intended to survive a fourth.
"Then you take that image to him," Mags said. "Tonight. Before you sleep on it. Before you talk yourself out of it. Before you start thinking about all the reasons it might be smarter to wait."
"I know."
"You don't know. You think you know. But you have never had to look a man you respect in the face and hand him proof that he was wrong about something that mattered." Mags leaned forward. "That is a different kind of knowing, Senna. That is the kind that lives in your teeth for the rest of your life."
Senna picked up the protein block. She opened it. She took a bite. It tasted, exactly as advertised, like a boot that had been left in the sun.
"Where is he?" Senna said.
"Survey tent. He likes to look at maps when he can't sleep, which is most nights."
Senna stood. She picked up her pack. The cylinder and the image plate shifted inside it, two weights against her spine, one cold and one warm.
"Mags."
"Hmm."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me yet. Thank me when you are still alive to say it again." Mags waved the wrench. "Now go. Before I change my mind and lock you in a case with the rest of the secrets."
Senna went.
The survey tent was at the northern edge of the camp, where the basalt ridge curved away from the wind. A single lamp burned inside, its light throwing Idris's shadow long against the canvas. She stopped at the entrance. She could hear him breathing. She could hear the faint scratch of a stylus on a map.
She thought about Mags's words. She thought about the ship in the hangar. She thought about Cage, twenty years old, telling her he wanted to make her proud. She thought about the weight in her teeth that was going to live there for the rest of her life.
She pushed open the flap.
Idris looked up. His face was the face of a man who had been expecting this, who had perhaps been expecting it for a long time, who had set the lamp at this angle on purpose so that whoever came through the flap would see his face and know that the lamp had been burning and the maps had been open and the night had not been kind.
"Senna," he said.
"I found something," she said. "I need you to look at it."
She set the image plate on the map table between them. She did not explain it. She did not narrate it. She let him look.
He looked.
He was quiet for a long time. The lamp burned. The wind moved ash against the canvas. Somewhere outside, a turbine coughed and resumed its patient work.
When he finally spoke, his voice was steady, which surprised her, and perhaps surprised him.
"Where did you find this?"
"The restricted archive. Lower tier. Mags showed me the door."
"Mags." He almost smiled. "Of course it was Mags."
"I am not asking you to forgive her."
"I am not asking you to forgive me." He set the stylus down. He did not take his eyes off the image. "Senna. I knew the file was there. I did not know what was on it."
"Did you look?"
"I was told not to look. I was told that what was in that archive was classified in ways that outlasted the institution that classified it. I was told that opening certain cases would compromise the convoy's relationship with parties who were supplying us with the only clean water we had access to for three years."
"And you believed them."
"I believed them long enough to let your brother's name sit in a file I did not open." He looked up then, and his eyes were not the eyes of a man who had slept, or not much, or not well. "That is the truth. It is not an excuse. I will not offer it as one."
"Then help me find out what happened to him."
"I will."
He stood. He turned off the lamp. The tent went dark, and then his silhouette moved past her, out the flap, into the ash-thick wind, and she followed, because there was nothing else to do, and because for the first time in thirty years the path ahead of her was not a memory but a place she had not yet been.
The wind carried the taste of the old catastrophe, and beneath it, faint, the hum of something that might have been Field, or might have been the convoy, or might have been the first quiet chord of a song she did not yet know how to sing.