Aravena (Human, Fliade surface party)

The squeeze was worse with the handheld. Everything is worse with one more thing. Aravena went in sideways with the stone turned lengthwise and the handheld pressing a hard square into the breastbone, and came out onto the silt with the light held low and the breath not back yet, and there was the one on the line, in the open, still, grey, large, as every shift.

And beside it, someone else.

An arm's length to the side. On the line. Facing the squeeze, the way the one on the line faced it. Upright, about the same size, still in the same way. Aravena's light was on the silt, low, finding the first one's feet the way it always found them, and Aravena's hand, without being told, took the light to the side.

It went round.

Aravena had looked at the imager's frame fifty times and had argued with Egede about the edge and had said the light is going round it and had not, until now, known what that meant. It meant this. The light lay on the silt and reached the place and did not go onto the shape the way it went onto the first one's grey fur and found the texture of it. It went round. A thin bright line, all the way round, and inside the line, nothing the light could land on. And on the silt behind, where the first one's shadow lay long and black across the ground in Aravena's light, there was no shadow at all. The silt was lit as if the place were empty.

The one on the line did not turn toward it. Aravena saw that. The one on the line looked at Aravena, the way it always did, and did not look to the side, and did nothing, with the whole body, the way it always did nothing, except that this time Aravena thought the nothing was being done on purpose.

Every part of Aravena that was not the eyes wanted to go back through the crack. Aravena knew this feeling. Aravena had had it once before, on this silt, a year ago, and had not gone back then, and had been answered.

So Aravena did the thing they had come to do.

Knelt. Set the stone on the line, on the silt, a hand from the first one's feet. Not from the other's. Aravena did not decide that; it was decided before Aravena was on the ground. Stood. Stepped back, one step, toward the crack. Said the thing, facing the one on the line, going up at the end.

Waited.

The one on the line bent, and put a hand to a rock at the edge of the silt, and moved it. The ground said so, through the silt and Aravena's boots, the way it had a hundred times.

The other one did nothing at all.