Orfeus jostled her bag on her shoulders, so the water bottle swooshed. “This is hardly my first trek,” she said. She looked out ahead of them. The terrain wasn’t perfectly smooth, dipping into hills and hummocks and buttressed by roots, but not too difficult. “Nowadays I get sent transportation more often than not, I’ve even been on flyers, but back when I started out?” She smiled at the memory. “It was all by foot, wandering from town to town and playing there, seeing who’d have me.”

“Significance warned me you would be charming,” Rivasoa said, as if to herself. “That it would be wise to be on my guard.”

Interesting. “I’m really not being charming, though,” Orfeus said. “You’d know, right? If I tried to play you false, you’d see right through it with that honest eye of yours. I wouldn’t try. Not actively trying to vex you every second we spend together doesn’t mean I’m out to be charming. This is just me.”

Rivasoa stopped for a moment, holding out her hand to a passing butterfly, but it paid her no mind. She resumed walking. “That’s what worries me.”

“Hm.” Orfeus kicked at some dead leaves. “Significance is looking out for you, or there’s more to xyr agenda than I’d guessed at, or maybe xe just knows that we’re … fairly similar people,” she said. “Trust me about as much as you’d trust Significance, how’s that?”

“But you aren’t Significance,” Rivasoa stated. Orfeus trembled in joy. Oh, how she loved a straight man.

“Aren’t significant?” she said, crossing her arms across her chest. “Now, how dare you?”

Rivasoa stopped and looked at her, as intently as she had the butterfly though with less interest. At length she said, “I don’t think xe knew what xe was talking about.” She kept walking.

Orfeus followed her with a shrug and a grin. She hadn’t set out for this outcome, but she wasn’t about to complain. Easier when people underestimated you.

The walk passed without incident, through forests and fields and small working towns. Rivasoa insisted they stop at one point so she could sketch a deer.

By mid-afternoon the fields and forests were thinning, and the tall needle-like spires of Farflung could be seen in the distance. After a few more minutes, the trees gave way to reveal ground gilded in solar panels, black and gold and shining back the sun. Shining the sun in, mostly, drinking up the energy to be used later. Native grasses and wildflowers nestled between and under the panels, the fields bordered with hedges to form a green corridor that connected the pollinator habitat to the treeline.