“This is perfect, actually,” Nev said. “I live here.”

“That’s lucky,” said the woman.

But then, once they’d disembarked, Nev began to walk toward the cliff edge.

“Where are you going?” said Giddon.

“Home,” she said.

“The houses are that way,” Giddon said, pointing.

“I pretended I lived there,” said Nev. “I don’t need Quona Varana knowing exactly where I live. Come on, it’s this way.” Then, a small pack on her back and her fox still strapped to her front, she marched right off the cliff edge. Immediately it became apparent that there was a stair of rock where she’d stepped, but still, Giddon started forward in alarm.

Gathering himself, he stepped in behind her, Hava following.

—

The beach below was difficult, covered with loose, uneven rocks. Nev marched along it as if it were a smooth path through a grassy glade.

The gathering clouds on the horizon seemed closer, more menacing. “Is that a storm?” asked Giddon.

“Probably,” said Nev, not even glancing at it. “They grow for days, then move in.”

“That sounds ominous.”

“We’re used to it.”

After another minute, Giddon tried again. “Are you missing classes to take this trip?”

“Yes,” she said shortly, breaking off from the beach and beginning up a dirt path that climbed steeply into hills of golden grass.

“Will you be able to pick up where you stopped?” said Giddon, who usually left this nosiness to Hava, but today he was feeling unlike himself. Off-kilter, ever since the silbercows had shown him Bitterblue.

“I don’t know,” she said, then changed course again, leading them over the top of a hill and down onto the other side. “Shortcut,” she said, at Giddon’s puzzled noise.

“I wouldn’t want to have to follow verbal directions,” he said.

“I would never send a stranger this way.”

On the other side of the hill was a low wooden door, built so neatly into the hill’s slope that Giddon almost didn’t notice it. “What is that?” said Giddon. “Does that open into the hill?”

“It’s a sod hut,” said Nev, “for if you get caught in a storm.”

“But you have to know it’s there for it to be useful,” said Giddon. “Why is it hidden from the path?”

Nev hesitated, considering her own climbing feet. Then she said, “This is federally owned land. It’s against the law for us to build on it or into it. But storms rise fast. One of my neighbors died once, when I was a kid. We do what we have to, but out of the way.”

“But wouldn’t Parliament understand the need for a survival hut in a place with sudden storms?”