Aravena (Human, Fliade surface party)

Ferrant came down to the junction with the party the next shift, and stood where the working light stopped, and did not go a step past it, and did not ask to.

Aravena picked the stone. A good one. Ferrant watched that, and watched Aravena carry it to the front down the third passage, and did not follow, and did not say anything, and Aravena was aware all the way down of being watched by someone who watched things for a living, which was not the same as being watched by Egede.

The squeeze, sideways, the stone turned lengthwise, the side scraping. Out onto the silt. The one on the line, in the open, still, grey, large, as every shift. Kneel. Set it down. Step back. Say the thing, going up at the end. Wait.

The hand on the rock at the edge of the silt. The ground saying so.

Back through, not running.

Ferrant had heard it from the junction. Aravena could tell, because she was standing exactly as she had been standing, and her face had changed, in the way a face changes when a thing you have read about becomes a thing you have felt through your boots.

"Something answered that," she said.

"Every shift," said Aravena. "For a year."

"The same one?"

"I can't tell them apart. I'd say yes. I'd be guessing."

"Good. Say that in the log too." Then, lower, so that it was to Aravena and not to the junction: "What did you say to it? Before the answer. You said something; I heard the shape of it."

"It isn't in the log."

Ferrant looked at Aravena for about as long as it takes to say a name.

"Good," she said. "Keep it out."

Later, at the junction, with the imager on its stand and the third passage mouth as dark and empty as it had been every shift Aravena had looked at it in person, Ferrant went and stood at the edge of the light, where the light had been made to stop for two years, and looked at the dark the way Nakagawa looked at ground.

"Your light stopped here," she said, to nobody in particular. "For two years. You made an edge." And then, to Nakagawa: "I'd like to send a handheld down with the stone. Not a person. The instrument, carried, held low, pointed at the line. It would see what the eye sees and it would keep it."

"A knock is one person and a stone," said Nakagawa. "Not today."

Ferrant nodded, as if she had expected exactly that and had asked so that the asking would be in the file.

"Then not today," she said.