Aravena (Human, Fliade surface party)

Aravena was last up the passage, that shift, with the unit on their back where it had ridden every shift since the first, and heavier than Aravena remembered, though it was the same unit.

At the bottom of the long passage, where the third passage came in, Aravena stopped.

The others were ahead, going up, their light going up with them and the talking getting fainter the way it did. Aravena stood with the light held low and turned round, and faced the third passage, and the dark at the end of it, the real dark, down where the squeeze was and the silt and the line and whatever had carried the unit all that way and held it while it woke.

Nobody had told Aravena to do this. Nobody would have said not to. Neither of those is a reason, and Aravena knew it, and did it anyway.

"Was that all right?" said Aravena, to the dark, not loudly. The question went up at the end, the way a question does. Aravena meant it for the one who had carried it. For Four.

And then waited. Stood there, with the light low and the others gone on, and waited the way you wait for an answer, for as long as it is polite to, and then a little longer.

Nothing answered. On Aravena's back the unit hummed once, the way it did when it woke and found nothing, and stopped.

Aravena went up.

The log that shift said that nothing had happened, in Aravena's own voice, because that was the order, and it was true, and the log did not have a place in it for the other thing. Some things you can only say to the dark. That does not make them not said.