Six hundred kilometers south of the camp, under a range with no name on any corporate map, something had been pulling at Kael since the night after the cave-in.
It had started as a lean.
A tilt in his attention when he faced that direction and nothing at all when he faced away, and he had spent four nights proving it wasn’t the wind, not the pumps, not a fever off the burn.
By the fifth night it had gone from a lean to a pressure, low and patient and entirely uninterested in whether he wanted it.
Come here.
Find me.
Open me.
Not words.
Nothing so clean as words.
But nothing else fit.
He had no way to get there.
He was debt-bonded to a corporation that wouldn’t move him a hundred meters without a transfer order, and the pass into that range would be sealed by the storm season within the week.
There was exactly one person on Varn’s Reach with a ship, a crew budget, and a reason to go looking at something buried.
She was leaving in four hours.
Kael went to the mine office before the second sun cleared the tailings and stood in the doorway until Vos looked up from a crate she was strapping.
“You again.” “Yes, ma’am.” “I’ve paid out everything I’m going to pay for information on this rock, which is nothing, because that’s what dead assets are worth.” “It isn’t about him.” “Then it’s a waste of my morning.” “It’s about where he was going.” Her hands stopped on the strap.
Kael had built this in the dark over two nights, and the build was mostly true, which was the whole craft of it.
Every part he couldn’t verify was pressed into a gap the facts had already opened.
“He talked about a ruin,” he said.
“The foreman.
Down south, in the mountains.
He said something was buried there.” “Miners talk about ruins on every world I’ve ever worked.
It’s always a lost cargo and it’s always three days’ walk.” “He said it called to him.” Kael watched her face when he said it, and the face did what he had gambled it would do.
“That’s the word he used.
Called.
He said it had been at him for months and he was going before the storms shut the pass, and then he stopped saying anything at all about it, right around when your ship came down.” Vos let go of the strap.
“He said called.” “Yes, ma’am.” “To a room full of miners.” “To two men who worked the trestle with him.
The two who died standing next to him.” He held her eyes exactly long enough.
“I know how that sounds.
It’s the second time I’ve had to tell you the only witnesses are in the ground.” “It sounds like a story a man builds to explain a thing he already believes.” “Then check it against your instrument.” That landed.
She looked down at the relic on the crate beside her, and Kael made himself go completely still, because everything now depended on what the crystals had been drinking for five days in an open yard.
She thumbed it on and turned a slow circle in the office.
The pulse changed when she faced south.
Not much.
A stutter and a lift, the same hitch it had thrown in the muster line, and it fell back to idle when she came around north again.
She did it twice more to be sure.
“Huh,” she said.
“Ma’am?” “That’s a bearing, not a find.” She said it to herself, not to him.
“A weak read at extreme range.
Which is exactly what a buried site does through six hundred kilometers of rock.” “The pass closes in a week.” “I know when the pass closes, I flew over the front coming in.” She pulled up a map on the slate and stood looking at it with her jaw working.
“Three days.
Maybe four, if the storm walks slow.” “Then anyone who wants through has to move now.” “Don’t tell me my own weather.” But she didn’t look away from the map.
Kael waited.
He had learned that in a room where he had no power and no title, the strongest thing available to him was the pause after a true sentence.
Vos put the slate down.
“A Force-user goes somewhere because something calls to him,” she said, “and he dies before he can get there, and the site is still sitting under a mountain with nobody standing over it.
Do you have any idea what those places have in them?” “No, ma’am.” “No, you don’t.” She was already moving, crate forgotten.
“Neither do I.
That’s the point.
That’s the entire point.” She had her contractors on the ground by midday.
Not miners.
The corporation wouldn’t risk bonded labor it had already paid for on an expedition, and Vos didn’t want men who would faint at the first carved wall.
She brought in a second crew off her own manifest, off-world salvage people with plate on their shoulders and rifles slung, the sort who went into structures that hadn’t been opened since before anybody’s grandmother and charged by the day for it.
She hired ground haulers.
She bought the corporation’s storm forecast at a price the administrator repeated twice, out loud, in disbelief.
And she would lead it herself.
Kael had counted on that too.
A woman who had come six hundred light-years and stood in a yard reading a dead man’s residue off the dirt was not going to sit in a guest room while somebody else opened the door.
Kael stood at the fence and watched the plate and the rifles come off the ramp, and made himself name what he had just done, because a thing you don’t name gets away from you later.
Four days ago this woman had swept an instrument across his chest that could have ended him.
Now she was spending her own credits, her own crew, and her own last window before the storms to walk into a place he couldn’t reach and pry the front of it open, and she thought the whole thing was hers.
He had not fought her.
He couldn’t have.
He had turned her around and pointed her, and she had gone at a run.
The transfer took less work than the lie had.
“Absolutely not,” the administrator said.
“You’re a mine asset.
You’ve got three years on the book.” “I was in the yard when the foreman went off.” “So were twenty-nine other men.” “I’m the one who talked to her.
Twice.” Kael kept his hands loose at his sides.
“She’ll want me on the ground when she gets there, and she’ll ask you for me, and you can either hand me over now or explain later why you told her no.” The man’s mouth opened and shut.
“And if the detail doesn’t come back,” Kael added, “your incident file closes with the last man who spoke to the deceased no longer on the roster.
That’s a clean report.
Nobody audits a clean report.” The administrator looked at him for four full seconds.
Something crossed his face, part relief and part a very late suspicion, and the relief won because relief always won with men like him.
He thumbed the slate.
“Salvage detail.
Effective dawn.” Mara came to the bunk-shed door that night with her belongings rolled in a canvas bundle under one arm.
“I’m on it.” Kael turned over on the cot.
“On what.” “Don’t.” She dropped the bundle at the foot of his frame.
“The whole camp’s talking about the transfer list.
Twelve names.
Yours is on it and it’s got no business being on it.” “Then take it up with the office.” “I already did.
I told him I’d been on the sorting line four years and could read a manifest, and he put me down without looking up.
That’s how much any of us are worth to him.” She stood there with her arms crossed.
“I lied to a corporate inspector for you.
In writing, eventually, because he’ll file what I said and my name goes on it.
If that unravels in a month I’ve got nothing to stand on and nowhere to stand.” “So stay here where it’s quiet.” “It isn’t quiet.
It’s a camp full of men who watched what happened and are going to keep watching me because I’m the one who spoke for it.” Her chin came up.
“You don’t get to leave me behind on this rock holding your story.” Kael looked at her a while.
He could see three ways to get her off the list before dawn and two of them would work.
He didn’t take any of them.
“Bring boots that fit,” he said.
“Not the issue ones.
Whatever you’ve got that’s yours.” At dawn the haulers came up out of the yard in a line of dust, and Kael sat in the back of the second one with a bad leg and a bandaged arm and a woman he now owed, and the pull went through him the whole way south, steady as a hand at his back.