"I’ve been surprised to not be featuring on the gossip channels lately," she commented.
"Ah, well, most of the upper command chain in KOTIS is very strict on privacy. Personal arrangements definitely are not considered general release reports. And I’m the one who organises Arcadia’s security detail. You might have noticed it’s always the senior squads here lately. Watching wide-eyed."
Laura laughed, and felt faintly reassured. The gossip would come, of course, especially if they did progress to the point of making things official. First stages were long past. Gone was the simplicity of feeling flustered, of exploring a mutual attraction, of scratching an itch. There was nothing light about the way she felt when thinking about Gidds, the awareness of his absence, the comfort of his presence. They were starting to knit together, to consolidate attraction into belonging. And, yes, the deeper the strands of their lives intertwined, the more the potential for hurt grew. Not simply that his interest could wane, but the kind of pain she felt now, born out of her inability to shield him from his past, and from the weight of a thousand duties.
"They have the rest," Maze said then, and his voice was a mix of relief and dismay. "Some injuries among the Kalrani, but not serious. One of the missing children is dead, the other two critical."
At almost the same moment, a text appeared in her interface.
Gidds: All Kalrani recovered. One fatality among the explorers. I will be some time, Laura.
Laura: Come back here when you need to sleep, whatever time of day.
Because he would have nightmares. She knew he would have nightmares—she would have nightmares, and she stood only at the very fringe of events.
Gidds: I will.
Bare text could not truly carry emotion, so it was Laura’s imagination that supplied a thousand layers to two simple words. She squeezed her eyes shut briefly, then tipped her head back to gaze at the universe.
Laura hadn’t meant to go to sleep, but her mind slipped away during a visit to one of her most reliable comfort reads, and when it swam to the surface the day had jumped from mid-morning to early afternoon.
Gidds was with her. She turned, working not to wake him, and saw exhaustion writ as clearly as bruises on his sleeping face.
If he was having a nightmare, Laura could not tell. She couldn’t remember any of her own, and as her eyes drooped again she hoped they would stay away, but her subconscious was not so kind, and the second time she woke it was necessary to struggle from a tangled morass involving Cass and Julian and caves. This time she was alone.
Hoping her dreams hadn’t cut short Gidds' rest, Laura washed her face and tidied impressively tangled hair while checking her messages and then the proximity display. Gidds and Julian were together: an unusual development. Whenever Gidds was in the house, Julian had shown a marked increase in his tendency to only come down for meals. Curious, she went in search of them, following Gidds' measured, beautiful voice out to the pool. Julian said something in response, then looked around at her step.
Sunset, slanting over Braid Meadow, bathed the back patio with light, but that could not be the reason her son’s cheeks were so pink.
He didn’t seem upset, however, merely saying: "I’m doing dinner, Mum. Won’t be long."
"Fondue again?"
"You know you love it."
He took himself off to the kitchen, which was not very far away, but proceeded to make sufficient noise to cover any conversation. Amused, Laura smiled at Gidds, who was in full uniform, and managed to look as impeccably crisp as ever, despite the shadows still sketched in blue beneath his eyes.
"You need to head back already?" she asked, snugging herself into his side.
"I’ve been and returned," he said, drawing her down to sit on the cup-shaped whitestone bench she’d recently had grown. "I’ll spend some more time with several of the Kalrani tomorrow morning, before we head to Areziath. Just visualisation exercises, but they help a great deal." He glanced toward the kitchen, and a lighter note entered his voice as he added: "In all manner of situations."
Laura blinked at the idea of Julian doing anything as meditative as Sight talent visualisation exercises, but then realised that Gidds would be perhaps the best person to ask about trying to avoid embarrassing Sight and Place Sight revelations.
She leaned against his shoulder. "How useful of you. Perhaps he’ll stop vanishing whenever Siame visits the island."
"Many people can never be comfortable around Sight talents," he said, serious once more. "The diminished privacy, the broken nights, the need to seek places of quiet: it grows wearisome."
"You’re the one who looks tired," she pointed out, curling fingers through his. "Does—does it help you at all to talk?"
"Offer you descriptive words about the instructor who thought missing children a useful training exercise?" He lifted their linked hands, regarding them gravely. "But you mean Tasken. In truth, I don’t fully remember it. I was only eight—around three in your years. I dream about it on bad days, which I’m used to managing. It helped me a great deal to be able to come here. Arcadia is very calming in Place, and you draw my thoughts away from old wounds."
"Do my nightmares bother you?"
"They wake me. I watch them sometimes." He reached across to stroke a few strands off her cheek, then shared a log of her, asleep, the space above her full of jagged tracery.
"You keep a lot of scans," Laura said, not discomforted since she had taken a few of her own, when Gidds had been asleep.
"Because my Sights are often used for evidentiary matters, my role requires me to retain full logs. It is not quite as formal as the level of monitoring Cassandra suffers, but is similar."
"Does it bother you?" Cass absolutely hated the mandatory log kept of every single thing she did, for all it could only be accessed under the strictest protocols.
"There have been occasions when it has been used as a tool against me," he said. "And times when I have been so glad to have one of my life’s spare, precious moment preserved." He showed her a day, not so very long ago, and then kissed the fingers of their joined hands.
That led to more kissing, nicely filling the short time before Julian called them in for fondue, and a discussion of the public response to the Liriath incident.
"Increasing the amount of active monitoring might prevent other deaths," Gidds said in response to Julian’s questions, "but I doubt that the proposed changes will go through. The Kolaren contingent barely accepts the invasive aspects of the interface at the most basic level of monitoring."
"What’s the most basic level?" Julian asked, twining strings of cheese.
"The system reports if an exclusion boundary is crossed, or physical condition requires intervention."
"They’d have to be tracking you and checking on your physical condition to be able to tell that’s changed, wouldn’t they?"
"Yes. It is not actively observed, and no records are kept, however. Today’s incident triggered no alerts because the settlement boundary was not crossed, and no medical crisis occurred before the signal was blocked. The at-minimum change proposed is that signal loss triggers an alert."
"What’s so bad about that?"
"The argument is against an incremental slide to active monitoring. There are many who passionately believe the Taren system of monitoring has already been taken too far."
"Can you really get programs that shut your interface off?"
"Location masks. Primarily used to cover romantic assignations, from my observation."