Chapter 5: The Elders Tell Him Nothing

The woman's name was Fen, and she had the kind of face that had stopped explaining itself to strangers sometime in the previous decade.

She walked him off the dock and onto the main platform without asking if he was ready to walk, which he took as information about how the conversation would go. The two men fell in behind them at a distance that was neither escort nor threat but communicated both without committing to either. The settlement moved around their passage the way water moves around a hull — a natural-seeming displacement that was not accidental.

"Survey scope," Fen said.