Page 2 of Kavan

"Marshal, I've run excavations on eleven worlds. I've been buried twice. I understand risk."

"Then we agree on the fundamentals." Nothing at all moves in his face. "You understand risk. I remove it."

"You can't remove it. You can only decide who carries it."

His attention sharpens the way a scanner locks. Then he steps aside and lets us pass.

The survey goes out at fifteen hundred, four of us on the north cliff path with the wind hard enough to lean into. Eli talks geology the whole way, ash beds and a caldera that went quiet twenty thousand years ago and has behaved ever since. Orrek says nothing. I count three times he changes position without appearing to move, and every time he ends up between the group and the tree line.

The scan puts the nearest void eighty meters under us here. Eighty meters of solid rock, so there should be nothing to see. I work the cliff face anyway, and forty minutes in I find it.

The rock is wrong.

It isn't off by much. A meter and a half of the cliff, half swallowed by fig roots, where the columnar jointing stops behaving like columnar jointing. Basalt fractures in hexagons when it cools slowly, because nature loves a hexagon. Nature does not love a joint line that runs dead flat for two meters and then turns at ninety degrees.

I get my thumbnail into the seam and it goes in to the first knuckle. That's dressed stone. Somebody cut this and set it, and twenty thousand years of ash and rain did their best.

"Eli." My voice emerges steadier than I feel. "Come look at a corner."

He looks, swears, and then looks again.

By the time I turn around, Orrek is already there, close enough that I have to tip my head back.

"How far in does it go?" he asks.

"Kilometers, if the scans are honest."

"And how far in do you want to go?"

"All of it."

Out past the headland the storm line sits low and gray, and the light coming under it turns the cove to hammered copper. He looks at none of it.

"Tomorrow you go in behind me."

"I don't take orders from⁠—"

"It isn't an order." He finally turns his head, and those metal-colored eyes settle on mine. "It's the only thing I'm going to ask you for."

I open my mouth and nothing useful arrives.

He goes back down the path, and I stand there with my hand still on a corner that somebody carved before my species learned to fire clay, and I realize I never once saw him look at the view.

CHAPTER 2

KAVAN

Iwalk the perimeter at fourth watch, when the island is at its quietest and the light hasn't committed to anything.

My eyes work better than a human's in this. It means I can read the ground without a lamp announcing me to anyone on the ridge. Ash beds hold impressions the way wet sand does, and this ground has been holding them since long before the League filed a permit.

Sixty meters east of the seam Dr. Larkin found, a fig root has been cut.

It isn't broken, and nothing with teeth chewed through it. It was cut at an angle by a monofilament blade, and the cut face has oxidized to the color of weak tea. Eight days, maybe ten. I follow the line it opens and find a boot impression in the lee of a boulder where the rain couldn't reach it. The tread is a commercial hiking pattern, not League issue.

Under the boulder, pressed into the soil, there's a strip of gray polymer the length of my palm. Scan-shroud lining, the kind smugglers cut into blankets to walk crates past a customs sweep.

Somebody was inside this site before we were.