Aravena (Human, Fliade surface party)

Then Aravena did the thing they had come to do, because it was the thing they had come to do, and there was nothing else.

Knelt. Set the stone down on the line — on the silt, a hand from those feet, exactly on the line where the party's feet had stopped, because that was where a thing at a door goes. It made the sound a stone makes when it is set on ground. Small. Plain. Aravena stood up, and stepped back, one step, toward the crack, away from the stone, leaving it. The way they left the place to the party. The way you leave a thing at a door.

And said the thing.

Aravena had known what it would be since the morning, and said it, facing the one on the line, and it went up at the end, the way it always did. What it was is not in any log. The unit was at the junction. Aravena never filed it, and Nakagawa never asked, and the survey does not record what it was not given.

Then Aravena waited. The interval. The one the party had measured from the other side a hundred times without ever once knowing what it was for.

The one on the line bent down.

It put a hand — it had hands — on a rock at the edge of the silt, a big one, bigger than the stone Aravena had carried, and moved it. Just moved it, a little, the way you move a thing so that it is somewhere else. The rock ground against the floor and the floor took the sound and the sound went through the silt and through Aravena's boots and Aravena heard it, the way the party had heard it a hundred times from the upper levels and logged it and never known — a shift of rock, below the margin, felt more than heard.

The knock.

Aravena stood very still, in a new way, for about as long as it takes to say a name, while the whole of it arrived: the boulders, two years of boulders, every arrival, and what they had been, and that this was one, and that it had been done for Aravena, in answer, a hand from Aravena's own stone.

Then Aravena went back through the crack. Slowly, with the light held low, not scraping more than they had to, and did not run, and it was the hardest thing Aravena had ever done in the survey and possibly anywhere.