The house had a rhythm and Dave learned it the way he learned terrain — by observation and attention, by noting what recurred and what it meant when it did.

  Lana worked in the mornings, primarily. This was when she did the active cellular intervention — both hands on Taric's forearms, the focused inward look, long sessions that she ended with the single flexing of her fingers that Dave came to recognize as her version of setting something down. In the afternoons she read from one of the several thick volumes Nick kept on the shelves along the east wall, making notes in a small book in handwriting that was extremely small and extremely precise. In the evenings she checked Taric again — briefly, not the full intervention, more like the check a craftsperson does on work in progress — and then she was at the table, or she sat near the window, or she slept. She had told Dave she needed six hours. She took five and seemed to manage on them without difficulty.

  Nick's rhythm was different. He rose before anyone else and Dave never heard him do it — he was simply present when Dave came out in the mornings, often outside on the bench that caught the first light. His mornings were his. His afternoons he moved through what appeared to be decades of accumulated work: maps, notes, the kind of systematic documentation that accumulates when someone has spent a very long time trying to understand something large. He didn't explain this work to Dave. He didn't explain much, initially. But he answered questions when asked, and the answers were given the same way — completely, without inflation, exactly what was true and not more.

  "Cosmulo is a prison," he told Dave, on the second evening. Not as revelation — as if it were a thing Dave had nearly figured out himself and Nick was simply finishing the sentence. "Not a metaphorical prison. A literal one. Everyone who enters through the intake facility is a prisoner. The system that runs Cosmulo is a biological supercomputer called A.D.A.N. The Clergy are its primary human interface." He looked at Dave. "This is the short version."

  "What's the long version?"

  Nick considered this. "The long version takes several weeks to convey accurately and requires that you survive long enough to make use of it." He looked toward the room where Taric was. "I'll begin when he can participate."

  Dave thought about this for the rest of the evening and filed most of it under: later.

  — ★ —

  On the third day, Nick found Dave in the small clearing behind the house where Dave had been working through basic movements — not training, exactly, more the practice of someone trying to understand how a body they were responsible for currently worked. Dave had always been practical about his body in this way. It was a tool. Tools required maintenance.

  Nick watched for a while.

  "How's your SG percentage?" he asked.

  Dave paused. "I haven't had it assessed."

  "I don't need an instrument to assess it." Nick's dark eyes moved across Dave with the same quality Lana's did — looking through the surface. "It's high. Unusually high for someone without a Path." He tilted his head fractionally. "The Clergy evaluation in Vessen runs at the end of the month. You have strong potential for the Guardian Path. Stronger than most of the candidates they'll see."

  "I don't have money for the Vaccine," Dave said.

  "How much do you have?"

  Dave told him.

  Nick was quiet for a moment. "And the herbs you collected — what are they worth in Vessen's market?"

  Dave named a figure. It was the honest number: the silvar root they'd gathered before the creature appeared had been a good haul, and the secondary compounds they'd added during the ascent were rarer and worth accordingly.

  Nick was quiet for another moment. "Together," he said, "it might be enough. For Guardian. Not for Emissor — the Emissor evaluation has a review process and additional costs that make it inaccessible without Clergy affiliation." He looked at Dave steadily. "But Guardian is what your biology is built for. The rest would be choosing a Path because it was available rather than because it fit."

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  Dave thought about this. "You said you'd need to begin the long version when he can participate," he said. "But you're suggesting I leave before he wakes up."

  "Yes," Nick said. "He won't wake for another five days, approximately. You have obligations — the herbs need to be sold, you need money for the next weeks, and the evaluation is time-specific." He paused. "Leaving is not the same as abandoning. He'll know where you went when he wakes up."

  Dave looked toward the house. Through the window he could see the shape of Taric's form on the bed, the faint blue-white pulse of the channels still active even unconscious.

  "He thought I was dead," Dave said. "When he fell."

  "Yes."

  "He'll wake up and I'll be gone."

  "Yes. But Lana will tell him why." Nick sat on the low fence at the clearing's edge with the ease of someone for whom sitting down was a considered action. "He'll understand. Or he won't, and you can explain it yourself when you return." He looked at Dave. "You are coming back."

  It wasn't a question. But it also wasn't an assumption — it was the particular way Nick said things he had assessed to be true and wanted confirmed.

  "Yes," Dave said.

  "Then leaving is logistics, not abandonment." Nick stood again. "The evaluation is in four days. If you leave tomorrow morning you'll reach Vessen in time."

  — ★ —

  Dave left the following morning.

  He said goodbye to Nick, who received it with the handshake of someone who understood handshakes as a complete language and used them accordingly. He said goodbye to Lana, who was in the middle of a stabilization session and nodded without looking up, which was not dismissal but was the only form of acknowledgment available to someone whose hands were currently occupied with keeping a person alive.

  He stood for a moment at the door of the room where Taric was. The channels were quieter today — Lana's work was visible in them, a more organized pattern, less the frantic overcurrent of something trying to activate all at once and more the tentative structure of something beginning to understand its own architecture. Taric's face in unconsciousness had the smoothed quality of someone freed briefly from the effort of managing things. He looked younger. He also looked, even unconscious, like someone who was paying attention to something.

  Dave had known him for two days before the mountain. A person did not know another person in two days in any complete sense. But Dave had noticed, in those two days, specific things: the way Taric assessed a room before trusting it, the quality of attention he gave to problems rather than their solutions, the specific kind of steadiness that wasn't absence of fear but was the decision not to let fear set the agenda. These were the things Dave recognized — not because he was similar, but because he spent his life learning things, and what Taric was was a thing worth learning.

  He left. The herbs were in his pack. The bone club was at his belt. The Vessen evaluation was four days away and he had enough provisions to make it in three.

  He walked and thought about what Nick had said: leaving is not the same as abandoning.

  He thought: that's true. He thought: it's also not entirely comfortable.

  He filed the discomfort and walked.

  — ★ —

  The Ferren problem.

  Dave had been in Drevhan during the days after the mountain, and during those days — the days when he had sat at the fire in the square and drunk something hot and tried to understand the specific shape of loss — a thing had happened that he had witnessed the beginning of but not the end.

  A thin young man with hollow cheeks and fingers that couldn't stop moving had been sitting near that same fire on Dave's second evening there. Dave had noticed him the way he noticed everything: with the automatic, habitual attention that processed and filed and moved on. The young man's hands were wrong. Too warm, by the quality of how the fire's light caught the skin. His eyes had the shimmer-at-the-edges look that Dave had come to associate with early involuntary evolution symptoms. He sat near the fire and watched it with the concentration of someone who couldn't stop watching.

  A Missionary had found him. Dave had watched this too — watched the smooth, professional compassion of the approach, the smile that was completely genuine and completely serving its purpose, the way the young man had been folded into an offer of help that he didn't have the language to decline. They had left the square together. The Missionary to the station. The young man to whatever the Missionary station did with people who had high IC percentages and no one watching out for them.

  Dave had not intervened. He had been two days in Cosmulo and had not yet understood what the Missionary station was, and by the time he understood it well enough to have a response to what he had seen, the young man was gone and the moment was closed.

  He thought about this on the walk to Vessen. He thought about the briefing document and the systematic efficiency with which it had not explained certain things. He thought about Nick's voice saying: Cosmulo is a prison. He thought about what that meant for everyone who was in it who didn't have someone like Nick watching their slopes through a scope.

  He reached Vessen on the third day and found it larger than he expected.

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