Page 272 of Every Almost

Charlie watched Tavi try to think of a reply.

"Fair."

The female Palu went up the ramp. Charlie listened to the metal on the hinge complain but it held.

"Alright!" Tavi shouted. "Team Bad Ass strikes again! Time to pack up and head home."

Home.

Because that's what it had become, hadn't it? Almost without Charlie even knowing it. She would always miss Katie,wondering how her life was going, what she was doing, who she was with. It was a loss she knew she'd never recover from.

But with her appointment to Chief, the jobs she was getting to do, and the people she called her friends and not just her crew, she began to realize that this was exactly where she was meant to be.

And Reyna...

Charlie had spent the whole shuttle ride down running the broken sentence Reyna had last left her with through her head like a tape she couldn't switch off.

Charlie, I?—

She was going to find out. She'd made that decision before they'd landed on the planet. When she returned, she was going to walk onto that ship with two rescued animals in the hold and go find that woman and make her finish it.

"Bay's secure," Maren said. "Both Palus are stable. Vitals nominal."

"Borran, get in here, you magnificent bastard," Tavi said, tugging on what looked like Borran's leg. Then he turned to Charlie, smiling broadly. "Charlie, you good? We're wheels up."

"Yeah." Charlie was standing at the bottom of the ramp, looking back at a town where nothing was broken. "Yeah, I'm coming."

She reached into her utility pocket and keyed the scanner one last time.

It was a habit. It was always the last thing on a checklist, the one she'd created years ago in a garage in Indiana, where Frank Beckman had told her that the job is never done until you've checked one more time. So, she did as she was taught and ran the scanner once more over the town.

The scanner came back.

It showed three red dots.

Charlie stood absolutely still.

The dots were inside the colony's residential ring, about four hundred meters from where she was standing.

They were clustered, not moving.

She keyed it again. And the same three appeared.

"Charlie?" Tavi's voice. "We're wheels up, come on."

She looked back at the paddock, then at the scanner, then at the paddock again.

And suddenly it made sense, the whole situation.

Twenty-two thousand kilos of Gravhorn Palu had been standing in a paddock next to those dots for nine hours. With layered cartilage, bones like tree trunks, and muscle dense as stone, it was clear that an animal evolved on a high-gravity world would be so structurally impossible for nothing to get through it.

Including a scan.

And then Charlie turned around and looked at the building at the end of the row.

Four hundred meters away, next to the Palu paddock. It was folded in on one corner.

It had come down in a tremor while the people of the town were carrying their lives out to the transports.