“Oh, no, I couldn’t,” the woman said. Which was probably true on a literal level; she could not accept a favor from someone she was interrogating. “But if you would allow me to sit with you . . .”

“Of course,” Kath Two said, and waited while the woman’s coffee was made. The screen above the counter had cut to a different part of the Epic, consisting of a conversation that had taken place aboard Endurance shortly before the Final Burn, in which Dinah and Ivy had talked each other into believing that Julia wasn’t as bad as all that. Kath Two had always found it a little cloying. People quoted lines from it all the time. It had served as the basis for political movements and parties that had sought to build stronger alliances between the Julians and other races. As such, its timing was fortuitous. Had Kath Two been of a Julian turn of mind, she’d have wondered whether the whole thing had been staged, the playlist’s timing rigged by someone behind the scenes at Quarantine so that she would see it just before sitting down to coffee with this woman. Because that was how Julians were. It was the choice that Eve Julia had made during the Council of the Seven Eves. Her strain, living in relative isolation in their segment of the ring, had intensified it through the selective breeding process known as Caricaturization. Julians had developed huge eyes, sleek ears, and small mouths as part of that; it was the single easiest way to identify one from across the room.

The woman saluted before sitting down. Julians saluted with their left hands, kept off to the side of the face so that the hand never passed through the eyeline. “Ariane,” she said. A common Julian name, derived from the rockets launched from Kourou, which Eve Julia had defended by nuking the Venezuelans. “Ariane Casablancova.” Meaning that she was the daughter of a woman named Casablanca, after the White House.

Kath Two saluted back. “Kath Amalthova Two.” For Kath Two’s mother had been named after the asteroid that had sheltered Moira and her lab through the Big Ride.

Ariane sat down across from her, huge eyes fixed impassively on Kath Two’s face.

“Look,” Kath Two said, “I’m no good at this. I don’t belong to any kupol and I don’t want to join. Just ask me what is on your mind.”

“Just wondering if you saw anything interesting on the surface.”

“My whole point in going there is to see interesting things. I hardly see anything that is not interesting.”

Ariane just sat expectantly.

“I filed a report,” Kath Two said.

“And discussed its contents with Beled Tomov?”

“Yes.”

“But not with Rhys Alaskov.”

“Rhys was asleep when Beled and I were talking.”

“You slept quite a bit as well,” Ariane remarked. “Ten hours on the flivver.”

“I had been flying a glider all day.”

“With frequent naps.”

“Every time a Moiran sleeps in a little bit,” Kath Two said, “it doesn’t mean that we are going epi. Sometimes we are just tired, is all.”

“Time will tell. Now you are journeying to have a face-to-face conversation with your mentor,” Ariane said. “Or so you think.”

“What does that mean?”

“Dr. Hu is not on Stromness. You would know as much if you had coordinated with him. But you didn’t. Instead you made an impulsive plan, spur of the moment, to visit a place with which you have good associations. Something’s troubling you. You are aware that you might be starting to go epi. You won’t discuss it with ‘Doc’ until you are face-to-face with him, in a place where you feel safe. It must be something you observed on the surface. Something unexpected.”

Telling Ariane Casablancova to read Kath Two’s report wouldn’t help. Probably she had already perused it several times. She wanted to hear the story fresh.

“I might have seen a human,” Kath Two said.

“Might?”

“It was a glimpse. From a distance.”

“Not another surveyor—or else you wouldn’t see anything remarkable in it.”

“Surveyors wear bright clothes, for visibility.”

“Beled didn’t.”

“When he was passing near the RIZ, no, of course not. I’m speaking in general.”

“Go on.”

“This person was wearing the opposite. Sort of like—”

“Like what?”

“You ever see pre-Zero videos with hunters? They used to wear clothes that would make them less visible.”

“Camouflage,” Ariane said.

“Yeah. I think this person was in camouflage.”

“Not a surveyor, then.”

“So—military, perhaps?” Kath Two asked. “But the only purpose of military is to fight other military. And I’m pretty sure there’s no other military down there. Unless there’s been some kind of infraction. But if there’d been an infraction, I’d have been warned of it before I was dropped. Hell, they’d have sent a Thor after me.”

“Did it occur to you that it might be a fresh infraction? Which you were the first to notice?”

The question kind of hung there. Ariane’s implication was clear. If Kath Two had witnessed anything of the sort, she ought to have reported it immediately instead of sleeping for ten hours and then making a harebrained effort to find Doc in a place where he wasn’t.

“No,” she said. “That’s not what this was.”

“How do you know?”

“I was making passes over the lake for a long time. I was clearly visible. Anyone who was there for no good reason would have simply hidden in the trees until I was gone. That’s not what this person did. They were down near the shore in a place where they could get a clear view of what I was doing. Like—”

“Like what?” Ariane asked.

“Like they were gawking.”

After a long silence, Ariane repeated the word, “Gawking.”

“Yeah.” Until this point, Kath Two had felt uncomfortable under Ariane’s gaze, but now she looked directly into the great penetrating eyes for a while.

“When this person moved,” Ariane said, “did you get any sense as to posture and gait?”

“I don’t think it was a Neoander,” Kath Two said, shaking her head. “That I would have reported.”

Ariane blinked and said, “The simplest explanation is, of course . . .”

“An Indigen. Which is the possibility I discussed with Beled.” She was feeling a little on the defensive now. “But what would one be doing there? So far from the nearest RIZ.”

“It is a mystery.”

“Yes.”

“That explains why you broke profile,” Ariane said, nodding.

“I don’t even know what ‘broke profile’ means to you people.”

“Did you ever get the sense that you were being watched? Followed?”

Ariane Casablancova had the damnable habit of asking good questions.

“You have to assume, when you’re down there, that—”

“That you are not going unnoticed by local megafauna. Of course.”

“Over time, hiking solo, trying to be aware of that, it can make you sort of, I don’t know—” She didn’t want to use the word “paranoid” around a Julian, since it was a racially charged word. Ariane seemed to sense this, and found it ever so slightly amusing. She leaned forward slightly, trying to help Kath Two over the sticky place.

“You develop a heightened awareness. Perhaps, to be safe, you interpret the sounds of the wilderness—”

“In the most conservative possible way, yeah. Like, the morning of my departure I was awakened by patches of light moving around on my tent. I thought for a minute that it might be caused by the movement of a large animal, passing between me and the sun. Then I emerged from the tent and saw that it had just been my imagination, that the light was shining between tree branches that were moving in the wind.”

“Interesting! That heightened awareness of things, over a long enough span of time, does seem just like the sort of stimulus that could trigger an epigenetic shift in a Moiran,” Ariane said.

“The thought had occurred to me.”

“You didn’t mention it in your report.”

This was the first time Ariane had come out and admitted that she’d read the report, and so it pulled Kath Two up short.