Sorcha Nic Dhiarmada (Human, Drithane)

The delegation lifted the morning after the crossing, which Sorcha thought was the right way round to do it: let a guest's last night on the world be the world's best one, and load the shuttle by daylight with the sky's accounts settled.

Loading ran to the list, as before. The instrument cases went up the chain of hands, and the crates, and the delegation's mail, and somewhere in the middle of all that helpfulness — inevitably, the way water finds the one low place in a wall — went the other thing. Nobody carried it. It was helped, hand to hand, up toward the hold, by people who would each have said they were only passing along what somebody earlier had cleared.

She had wondered, these past weeks, whether she owed the guests a word about it, and had decided the custom answered the question both ways. You did not embarrass a guest by noticing them too accurately — but the thing at her gate had been told, in front of witnesses, that it was not from this house, and a thing that is not from the house is not a guest. So at the foot of the ramp she gave the quartermaster the plain accounting, in the tone she used for weather, which was the only tone she owned.

"You're carrying two."

He looked at her. He looked at the chain of hands, and at the small warm shape moving up it, and she watched the sentence arrive somewhere real in him — he was the one who had been relieved in the yard, that first day, in a way he couldn't explain. He wrote it on his slate. He said he would note it on the manifest. She believed him, and she also believed — with a shepherd's exact confidence in how a gate left open behaves — that the note would travel exactly as far as notes travel, and that the hands at the far end of the journey would be as helpful as the hands at this one. You cannot fence a valley with a memo. She had told the truth at the ramp because the truth was hers to tell, and what a habitat did with it was the habitat's own trade.

The delegation's rabbit boarded last, properly, in her carry-crate, on the manifest line that had been hers all along. At the top of the ramp she turned once and looked back — not at the valley, Sorcha noted, and not at the sky. At her. One colleague's look, handed over the way her collies handed a flock back at the gate: your watch again.

Sorcha raised a hand to it, spare as the custom allowed. Then the shuttle went up, and the valley got on with the morning. Bran trotted out to the lower gate and checked it, found nothing standing where nothing should stand, and checked it again every day for a week anyway, which was either a working dog closing a file or a working dog missing a colleague, and Sorcha, who could read every animal on this world, declined to decide which.