Rhen woke at the second hour of morning.
He lay on the floor and looked at the ceiling of the room above the supply trader and he did what he had been doing since the door opened: he looked at it. He took the ceiling in with the totality of attention he had given to everything. He was not cataloguing. He was simply being present to it, which was something the cells had not permitted.
He sat up. Looked at the room. Looked at the people in it. Then he looked at the window.
"We're moving," Sael told him. "Commission tracking unit, mid-morning. West toward the Pale Road."
He was quiet. Not absence — processing time. He thought before he spoke and spoke when the thinking was done.
"West," he said.
"West," Sael confirmed.
He was quiet again. He looked at the window and then at his hands. His hands were his — scarred and reconstructed and his, still there.
"I'm not going west," he said.
The room received this.
"I know what you're going to say," he continued. "It's not safe to separate. The tracking unit is coming. West is correct for most people. That's all true." He paused. "I have somewhere I need to go first. Not instead of eventually finding you again. Just — first. There's a place I need to see. I don't know if it still exists. But I need to go and see whether it does, and if it doesn't I need to stand in the place where it was. I can't do that going west."
"Where," Eclipse said.
"East of here. Angled south. Southern edge of the Gutlands. My family's farmstead. Or where it was." He looked at the window. "I know it won't be there. Seventy to ninety years — it's gone or taken in one of the territorial shifts. I know. I still need to go."
"And," Yeln said, "I'm not going west either."
The room looked at her.
"Nahun," she said. "The desert region south of the Pale Road. The Kael Market. My mother had a stall there. I know she is gone. I am going to the market anyway. I need to know if anyone there remembers a woman named Adra who sold woven goods fourteen years ago. I need there to be someone who can tell me one thing about what she was after I was taken. Even if it is only that she existed."
Orvienne looked at them both.
"Nahun is south of the Pale Road," she said. "If you travel west with us to Kaer's Gate junction, you can take the southern branch from there. Two days together, then you have a proper road south rather than open Gutlands."
Yeln recalibrated to the absence of resistance. "Two days, then Kaer's Gate, then south."
"Yes."
Eclipse gave them each a stone.
Not asked — he simply reached into his coat and produced two pieces of Gutlands stone, smooth-edged and unremarkable, and did the same thing to each of them that Orvienne felt as a faint negative pressure in the ambient Thread-field. The absence of something brief and specific. A door closing somewhere she couldn't see.
"When you're ready to find us," he said, giving the first to Rhen, "hold it and walk toward what it tells you."
"What does it tell me?"
"Nothing, until you're ready. Then it will be specific."
He gave the second to Yeln, who closed her hand around it without comment and put it in her pocket.
The parting was not dramatic. There was no time and none of them had the inclination. The important things had been said before the moment of leaving.
Sael stood in front of Rhen. She did not embrace him — they had been adjacent for decades through walls, which was its own form of intimacy with its own rules, and the rules did not automatically change because the walls were gone. She looked at him. He looked at her.
"East is also toward the Commission," she said.
"I know."
"Be precise about the angle."
"I will."
Yeln said: "Adra. In case you need the name of someone to carry while you're walking."
"I'll carry it," he said.
He walked out of the room and down the stairs and out into the morning of Vare's Crossing and turned east at the settlement's edge, angled south, and did not look back.
Orvienne watched him from the window until she could no longer distinguish him from the general texture of the Gutlands. It took longer than she expected. He walked the way Eclipse walked — wall-quiet, minimum motion. She wondered when he had learned it. She thought Eclipse probably knew.
They left Vare's Crossing at the third hour of morning. Four people, moving west — for now.
Orvienne with her supplies and her Echo Thread reading the path's history in the background hum of everything that had happened on it. Yeln with her hand going occasionally to her coat pocket, not checking the stone, confirming it. Sael with her arms slightly away from her sides, because the wind was still doing what wind did and she had not finished deciding what to do about that. Eclipse three paces ahead, processing, always processing.
"The marker you put in the stone," Sael said, after twenty minutes. "Is that a Severance?"
"Neither technique nor Severance precisely," Eclipse said. "It is a property of the absence. A shape of where I am, pressed into the stone. When Rhen is ready, it will orient toward me — toward wherever I am."
"And if something happened to you."
"Then it would remain as a record of where I was last. Which would still be useful."
Sael turned this over. "You've thought about this a great deal."
"I've had a great deal of time."
"What did you conclude," she said, "about the Commission. What they were doing."
Eclipse walked several paces before responding.
"They were founded by people who were afraid. The fear was legitimate — they had watched something enormous happen and they had been powerless during it. The institution they built was the answer to that fear." He paused. "The answer was not wrong. It was incomplete. And the gap between a legitimate fear and an incomplete answer, maintained across four thousand years — that gap produces a great many things. Most of them are in the cells I lived in."
"That's generous," Orvienne said. "Given what the gap produced specifically for you."
"It's accurate. Generosity and accuracy are not the same thing."
"No," she said. "They're not."
The path moved through the Gutlands' morning. Grey becoming less grey. The shapes behind the membrane not visible in this light but present, always present.
And somewhere east, moving at the Commission's angle south, a boy who had been seventeen for somewhere between seventy and ninety years walked with a smooth stone warm in his pocket and two names to carry and a farmstead at the end of the walking that was almost certainly gone.
The stone pointed west. It would tell him more when he was ready.
He did not know when that would be.
He walked anyway.