Sir Galahad Thorne (Human)

He had meant to come back sooner.

That was not an excuse. Galahad did not deal in excuses; he dealt in the gap between what should have happened and what had, and he had learned to read that gap the way he read incident reports — for what it implied, not what it claimed. What it implied here was straightforward. He had spent the day at Threshold Station confirming a coupling between a chronometer drift and a stand of seven trees, and he had let the confirming feel like progress, when the actual unfinished work was three years old and standing in front of him three years ago in the person of a woman he had told, in careful survey language, less than he knew.

He had not lied to Elvira. He had simply done what twelve years in the Corps had taught him to do without noticing he was doing it: filed the sayable version and kept the rest for people cleared to read it.

She was not cleared. She had never needed to be. That had been the error.

He walked out to the causeway with the full survey archive on a single data slate — eleven years of chronometer discrepancy, the six prior postings, the two unexplained events he had never been asked to elaborate on, and Syra's model from that morning, the one that said your safety margins become fiction in front of the whole operations room. He had not trimmed any of it for tone. He did not know how Elvira would take being handed eleven years of someone else's careful omissions at once. He had decided that was not his decision to make for her.

She was waiting at the edge of the causeway stones, where she usually was at this hour, doing the slow work of resetting a circle that would fail again if nothing changed.

"I have something for you," he said. "All of it. Not the summary."

She looked at the slate, then at him, and did not reach for it yet.

"Why now?"

"Because I found out today that your failed circle and my station's clock are the same problem wearing two names," he said. "And because Aldera told me, three days ago, in a report I only half-understood at the time, that this is what breaks it. Not the ritual. The disclosure."

He held it out again.

"I should have done this the first evening," he said. "I filed it instead. That was a mistake, and it was mine, not the Corps'."