Ammonite

Da

“I was born on a station orbiting Gallipoli,” Kahn said. “Earth isn’t home. The place they’d send us if we ever left here certainly wouldn’t be home. This may not be, either, but it’s a good enough place.”

Yes, Da

“If only we really knew what it’s like to live amongst these people,” she said, frustrated.

Letitia and Lu Wai exchanged glances. “But we do,” Letitia said slowly. “Kind of. Or, at least, Day does.”

“Day? Officer Day, the one that got rescued from the burn by that ski

“I believe she’s listed as missing, ma’am,” Lu Wai said.

“You mean she’s not dead?” The truth hit her. “You know where she is!”

“Yes.”

The sled hummed next to what was left of the northern perimeter gate as Lu Wai ran it through ground checks. Though it was only midmorning, it was dark enough for twilight; wind drove thick snow almost horizontally through the gloom. Inside her hood, Da

Da

“Do my best,” Dogias shouted.

The foul‑weather cab hatch slid back and Lu Wai leaned out. “Let’s get going. The weather will only get worse.”

Dogias jumped down from the flatbed and slid into the front seat; Lu Wai pressed the hatch‑seal button, cursed, and began to crank it down by hand.

The sled lifted off the ground with a whine. Snow hissed underneath it and bit at Da

The sled eased forward, gathering speed. Within two minutes, all Da

She felt suddenly lonely. Two weeks would be a long time without Dogias’s irreverence–maybe three weeks if the weather got worse. Da

That made her think of Marghe: no SLIC, no communication, hundreds of miles to the north where the weather, according to Sigrid, was brutal.

She started to walk away from the perimeter. Half‑dismantled, and deserted because of the weather, this part of Port Central already looked like a ruin.

Da

“Well,” Nyo said, “we could move it, yes, but we might not be able to get it back. And that would screw up what comm you’ve got down there.”

“The SLIC might not even be operational,” Sara pointed out.

Da

“It really wouldn’t be wise at this point,” Sara said. “What would the Kurstthink when they saw a satellite being moved? We can’t afford to do anything alarming, nothing that looks like change.”

Hiam was right. Da

Damn small things to base a life, many lives, on.

Chapter Ten

MARGHE AND LEIFIN were three days traveling through Moanwood to Ollfoss. Later, Marghe could not have said whether it was a year or no time at all. She remembered little: occasional fractured snapshots of trees that were not quite trees, whose roots were greater around than their crowns or which possessed no crowns at all; musty, sharp smells of small nesting animals; pain in her hands and feet and face. Most of all she remembered one day falling down on the snow‑dusted floor of the forest and lying on her back, dizzy, while leaves, or what might have been leaves, whirled around her head. She had laughed aloud, but the forest swallowed her thin bright ribbon of laughter and she quieted as she realized it was she who was the alien here; that the dark and the green around her would remain unaffected by her, could not digest her if it tried. Like cellulose in the gut of a carnivore, she could not be assimilated. Alien.

The rest of the journey was a jumble: Leifin climbing on top of her, keeping her warm; soft wet stuff in her mouth that Leifin had already chewed for her; Leifin sneaking something from her pocket then shouting at her to stop, stop, and Marghe realizing she had Leifin’s hand between her teeth and her gums hurt, but refusing to let go until Leifin put the vial back into Marghe’s pocket.

She remembered nothing of arriving at Ollfoss. She had imagined how it might have been, since: stumbling out from under the dark canopy onto the blinding white snow; past the open‑walled shelter that housed nothing but a small metal gong; along the snow‑covered path that ran between the bathhouse, built over the hot spring, and the famous vegetable gardens of Ollfoss; on to the houses and outhouses and gathering places that looked like stone versions of the tents of the Echraidhe, with horizontal slit windows and wooden shutters under their eaves of sod, and careful stone cha

More days followed spent tossing in fever; shouting in hoarse Portuguese for someone to turn the lights on; trying hard to swallow soup and crying when she spilled it; feeling pain in her hands and feet and face. Being tied down. She remembered faces looming over her, serious or smiling, but all strange.

So gradually that she could not have pointed to one day in particular and said, There, that was when I began to really recover, Marghe realized that what she thought were restraints on her arms and legs were bandages of cloth and moss. Her spi

The face that appeared most often, the one accompanied by pain in her smeary fever dreams, was a dark, walnut‑faced woman, Kenisi, who untied the cloth and removed the moss, rubbed something into the pain, replaced the wrappings with fresh moss and clean cloths. She was smaller, quicker than Borri, but she had the same eyes as the Echraidhe healer. Marghe tried to smile the first time she realized what Kenisi was doing, but split open her healing lip.

After a while she began to stay awake enough to sit up on the narrow bed she occupied, and to greet by name the other faces: Leifin, of course, the one with the shifting‑sea eyes and the thin mouth, who often brought a knife and sat whittling wood; Hilt, a tall woman whose hair, just a fraction darker than the coffee color of her skin, was the shortest Marghe had yet seen on this world. Hilt was a sailor, from North Haven, in Ollfoss to visit her blood sister Thenike, a viajera.