Aravena (Human, Fliade surface party)

Last up the passage, the next shift, the way it always was now. The light held low.

Aravena turned round at the bottom, where the third passage came in, and faced the dark, and asked it, the way Aravena had asked it every shift since the unit was lifted, whether that was all right. It went up at the end. Aravena waited, for as long as it is polite to and then a little longer, and nothing answered, and the unit on Aravena's back hummed once, the way it did, and stopped.

And Aravena stood there one moment more than usual, because a thing had arrived the evening before and had not finished arriving.

It was this. Aravena had been asking, every shift, whether it was all right — afterwards. After the party had come down the passage swinging its light and walked to the junction and worked and gone. Asking afterwards. Asking from behind their backs, in the dark, when the working was done and there was nobody there to ask. And the ones who lived here did not do that. They knocked before. They shifted a stone before they were anywhere near, so that whoever was in the place knew that someone was at the edge of it, and then they stood back, and left it. And you cannot ask somebody whether it is all right for you to be in their place when you have never once let them know you were coming.

Nobody answers a question you ask from behind their back. Aravena had been asking it for sixty shifts and had never once thought that the dark's silence might be manners.

Aravena went up.

The log that shift said that nothing happened. That was still true. But the party knew a thing it had not known, which is a different kind of nothing, and Nakagawa's line was still there under the count in the survey lead's own hand, and nobody had struck it out.