“So good to see you,” Toby said, holding him by the arms.

“How did you know?”

“Oh, it’s been all over the news. Amateur astronomers saw the ship had come back. Then the morning news said the shuttle was coming down. That you were on it. Indefinite whether you were coming down at Bretano or Jackson—I reserved a ticket to Bretano from here in case, but I bet on Jackson, and I brought the boat over. I saw you come in as I was coming into the harbor.”

“I can’t believe it. Damn, it’s good to see you.” His bodyguard knew Toby. Knew him well. Word was spreading to the few staff that didn’t know him, he was quite sure. “Come on. Come sit down.”

“The President was here, I gather.”

“Met us when we landed.” He had Toby by the arm, unwilling to let him go, and walked him down the hall toward his chosen rooms. “A quick move, up there. We weren’t sure we wouldn’t be shot at coming down, if we didn’t. At least that’s how we understand things stand.”

“It’s been dicey. Things have gone completely to hell on the mainland, by all reports.”

“I’m getting that impression.” He showed Toby into his suite, offered a chair. “Tea?”

“I’m fine,” Toby said. “No fuss.” A small silence. “Bren, we lost mum.”

He dropped into the other chair. “I’d tried to call her. Before I called you. But the number’d gone invalid. I thought that might have been the case.”

“Not long after you left,” Toby said. “About a week.”

He didn’t think the news would hit him that hard. He’d expected it. He’d known it had probably happened, two years ago. But he still felt sick at his stomach, guilty for the last visit not made, a skipped phone call, on a day when he’d had the chance and ducked out to get back into orbit. There’d been so many emergencies. There’d been so many false alarms. He’d put so much off onto Toby. Handle it, brother. Brother, I need you. Brother, I can’t get there. Can you possibly?

“She asked about you,” Toby said quietly. “I said you’d called.”

“That was a lie.”

“It was what she needed to hear. And I knew you would have called, if you could. I just glossed that bit.”

“You glossed everything, the last number of years. You glossed the whole last ten years. I don’t know what I’d have done without you. I didn’t know whether you’d be speaking to me when I got back.”

Toby shook his head. “You should never, ever have thought that.”

There was another small silence. Breathing wasn’t easy.

“So did you do it?” Toby asked. “Did you get the big problem solved out there?”

“We got the problem to talk to us,” he said, got a breath and chased the topics he lived with. “And this isn’t for public knowledge, Toby. I think it’s going to get into the news soon, but I don’t want it to spill yet. We established relations with a species called the kyo. They weren’t at all happy about the ship poking about in their business—they blew a bloody great hole in Reunion Station and they were all set to finish the job, except we talked them into just taking possession of it and letting us get the population off. They’re technologically ahead of us in some ways, they’re dangerous, and we got the station population safely out of their territory, humanity pretty well disengaged from them, the local Archive destroyed, which was another part of our job, but they did get the station itself, they got every other record aboard, and they’re watching us, even though they’re negotiating and probably studying us. They could show up here. I don’t know when.” He didn’t say what else the kyo had told them: that there was something more worrisome still on the other kyo border. That information was deeply classified information, and he wasn’t sure when or if he was going to let that detail hit the evening news.

And God help him, even while he was trying to figure how to explain things to Toby, his hindbrain was working on a plot to use that restricted information to scare hell out of certain factions on the island and among the atevi on the mainland. There was no decency at all in the automatic functions of his hindbrain. He just went on calculating and finagling, while trying to tell his brother as much truth as he thought he could, about something that had already cost their family dearly.

“Sounds like you’ve been busy the last two years,” Toby said, understatement.

“Busy. Busy with a ship full of refugees who still don’t know how serious their situation was.” That led into the kind of trouble said refugees might pose the current local station population, and that was a topic he didn’t want to get into. “How are you?” he asked, the thing he truly wanted to know. And the next painful question: “Did you get back with Jill?”

“No,” Toby said. Just, no, when there were two kids involved, and Toby’s whole life. “I gave her the house, the kids, I kept the boat… ”

“I’m glad you kept the boat.”

“She sold the house. Couldn’t stand to live in North Shore any longer.”

Bitterness in that. Jill had been the one who wanted to live on North Shore, far from their mother, which had led to their mother’s deep unhappiness and isolation, and a lot else that had gone wrong, with him living on the mainland. But apparently that effort, like everything else, hadn’t worked out for Jill.

“Are you happy?” Bren ventured to ask.

“Actually—yes. I am happy,” Toby said. “What about you?”

He didn’t live the kind of life where he expected to find that question coming back at him, as if he could sum everything up in the fact he owned a boat, or a house with a white picket fence. Or a wife. Or kids. He’d just never gone that direction—had skittered all over the map with his life, from obscure, ignored atevi court official to Lord of the Heavens, and was lovers with Jago, for what physical needs he had. No children there. Nor ever going to be.

He supposed he was happy. He was alive. Banichi and Jago were. Toby was. He’d be happier at the moment if he thought Tabini was, which he wasn’t at all sure about. He’d be happier if he didn’t have the business on the mainland looming ahead of him, and the prospect of everything their return might bring down on a peaceful countryside. But—

“Happy,” he said. “I think I’m happy. Happy being back. Happy seeing you again. Happy to have all my people safe. Except the mainland’s in a mess. And there are people I care about over there who have their neck in a noose—increasingly so, as the news of our landing spreads.”

“I take it you’re going across.”

“Fast as I can.” He couldn’t even apologize for the desertion. “I have to.”

“I brought the boat.”

He blinked. Twice. “No. I couldn’t possibly—”

“She’s small, she’s quiet, she has full instruments, and I know the atevi coast.”

“Damn, Toby.”

“Look, it’s a family outing. I’ve been waiting for this fishing trip for two years.”

Toby’s humor broke out unexpectedly, and it got right through his guard. He missed a beat in their argument, and Toby said, with a slap on his shoulder,

“Deal, then.”

“For God’s sake, no, it’s not. We’re arranging for the military to run us over there. People with guns and engines to stand off an atevi patrol boat. Or an air attack.”

“Noisy. Let the navy just keep a radar watch and be noisy somewhere between them and us. We’ll make it in when no one’s looking. I’m even provisioned, if you don’t mind hot dogs and chili. I can set you ashore with food in hand. I’ve got a whole box of survival rations. Where precisely do you want to go?”

He had no intention of listening to Toby. But he envisioned Toby’s fishing boat, the sort that was ordinary traffic on the waters of the strait, then envisioned, as Toby said, a noisy military move.

And, unhappily, he knew which he’d rather be on, given the certainty their enemies would have intercepted the news broadcasts which had detailed their landing. There was more than enough time for Murini’s crew to position Assassins on the coast, people who moved quietly and secretly, more than enough time for the Kadigidi to toughen the surveillance around Lord Geigi’s estate. That around his own, he was sure was constant and thorough. A military escort bringing them in on a fair landing on the coast could do nothing to protect them. Only secrecy and surprise could do that.