Aravena (Human, Fliade surface party)

This is logged the way things are logged on Fliade: by someone who was there, into a unit that was there too, and read afterwards by someone who was not. This season the reading afterwards goes back two years, to a thing that has been read every evening of them.

Aravena knocked.

Fourth year. The stone picked at the junction, the size of two hands. The squeeze sideways, the stone turned lengthwise, the handheld on the chest strap pressing its hard square into the breastbone, pointed low, with its sound off, as on every shift since the light went round. Out onto the silt, breath not back yet.

The one on the line, in the open, still, grey, large. Beside it, nothing. Aravena looked, every shift, at the place an arm's length to the side, and there had been nothing there for a long time now, and Aravena did not file the looking.

Kneel. Set it down, a hand from those feet. Step back, one step, toward the crack. Say the thing, facing the one on the line, going up at the end.

Wait.

The hand to the rock at the edge of the silt. The ground saying so, through the silt and the boots.

Aravena did not count them. A count is for things that might stop, and Nakagawa kept one anyway, and Aravena had never asked what it stood at. Back through the crack, not running, which was no longer the hardest thing Aravena had ever done and was still not easy.

"Log," said Aravena, kneeling to the unit at the junction. "Shift two-one-one. Upper junction. Party of three. Knock answered."

The unit hummed, once, low, to say it had heard. Aravena still liked that.

Then the shift. Egede at the far wall with the imager, saying less than Egede used to, since the year the imager had been right. Nakagawa reading the ground. The Anstolik had been through, three.

It was the turn of the year. You could tell, because Egede had the summaries to write, and said so: every instrument's year, by what it had recorded and how often, a page an instrument, in Egede's hand, signed by the survey lead.

They went up the long passage toward the cold, all three, talking. Aravena was last, as always, with the light held low, and did not stop at the bottom where the third passage came in. There had been a time for stopping there. The question had a place now, and it was not here.