Could he blame her for that?

He didn’t, particularly, in cold blood. But from dismayed at himself, he transited to angry at her. It wasn’t about the marriage; the anger was all for her campaign to get him back, and doing it by attending on his mother, running her errands.

What in helldid Barb think she was doing? was the first subsurface question. Why did she come now? Why did she court his mother, for God’s sake?

And looking into her face as he did, he didn’t truly know. One lonely woman befriending another? One woman who hadn’t been lucky in love, crossing generations to find a kindred soul, as close to love as possible?

In Barb’s paralysis, in that long, stricken stare… he disengaged, and with his face burning, he hugged Toby, hugged his mother, whispered a farewell, grabbed up his computer case, and followed the carpet to the waiting plane, head down, eyes on the carpet underfoot.

“Bren!” Barb shouted after him. Angry. Oh, damn, yes. Now she was angry. His nerves knew that voice, and for both their sakes, he hoped Barb wasangry… angry enough to get on with her life. Angry enough to divorce her new husband, or settle down and live with the choice she’d made three years ago—angry enough just to do something toward a future of her own. Whatever that choice eventually was, it wouldn’t be his choice, not any longer. It wasn’t his mother’s responsibility, either.

They couldn’t take up again where they’d left off. It wasn’t just the fact she’d married. It was the fact that he himself was no longer the Bren Cameron she knew. Then, he’d been a maker of dictionaries and a translator… until his life had exploded and put her in danger she’d been lucky to escape. He couldn’t go back to that safe anonymity now. Couldn’t join his mother’s fantasy, or Barb’s, that that anonymity would ever exist again. There was a reason for this concrete isolation.

And a great deal that was human wasn’t within his power to choose anymore. He’d already lost everyone on the island; he was about to lose his only human companion on the mainland. He wasn’t happy about it, but that was the choice far higher powers made.

He climbed the metal steps to the hatch of the airliner and still didn’t look back, refusing to give Barb a shred of encouragement, even if it meant he didn’t look back for his brother and his mother, either. His mother’s health wasfragile. He had reason to worry about her. Toby had had threats on his life and his family’s lives, because of him. And Barb had been a target … and knew it. Now she wasn’t, and she couldn’t let well enough alone.

His mother and his brother would come to the mainland for visits. Barb, on the other hand, couldn’t get the requisite pass—no matter how powerful her husband’s influence—because the visa depended on the atevi government, not her husband’s security clearance in the human one.

And doubtless she was upset about that, too. Barb wasn’t used to no. She really hated that word. It’s overwas another thing she’d made up her mind not to hear. I regularly sleep with someone elsewas damned sure outside her comprehension. If she knew, and knew that individual wasn’t human, that might figure in her determination.

But he hoped to hell not even his brother knew… certainly not Barb, because the next step was his mother knowing and the third was the whole island continent knowing.

“Mr. Cameron.” A human steward welcomed him aboard and took his formal coat as he shed it.

In that process he scanned the narrow confines of a jet configured for luxury. The passenger shell he’d used in the plane that had previously run this route had always sat as a removable inclusion in the hull just ahead of dried peas and fresh flowers; but this sleek Patinandi Aerospace number, the aiji’s plane, had tapestry for a carpet runner and seat upholstery of ornate atevi needlework. When it wasn’t ferrying the paidhi across the straits, it did transcontinental courtesy service for the aiji’s staff and guests… and the seats and furnishings were all to atevi scale.

Consequently, four Mospheiran diplomats sat like ten-year-old children in large-scale chairs, grouped around what was, relative to the chairs, a low table… sipping Mospheiran alcoholic beverages from atevi-scale glassware.

They’d be oblivious before they landed, if they didn’t watch themselves.

He knew who was who in the group, having been briefed; knew two of the four in the mission prior to this meeting, at least remotely: Ben Feldman was a spare, unathletic young man thinning at the temples, Kate Shugart, a woman with close-cut, dull brown hair drawn back in a clip—she’d trained to have his job, but the job had ceased to exist, and she’d never made the grade. Those two of the four were Shawn Tyers’ people, old hands in the Foreign Office. He trusted Shawn, or he had trusted Shawn—with his life, while he’d been an official working for the Foreign Office.

The other two… however…

He walked to the group, still with the taste of Barb’s lips on his mouth and a large breakfast queasy in his stomach. Shawn hadn’t briefed him about this more than to remind him Mospheira had applied to go to space, and to say that the aiji in Shejidan had cleared their mission most unexpectedly. They’d felt no choice but to go, immediately.

More, Shawn had said, the station in orbit had just called its second and lastrepresentative home, on this impending flight. A decision that would affect his work… profoundly.

And Tabini-aiji had cleared it.

It was one huge, upsetting mess, and Shawn couldn’t brief him fully, not any longer. They served different governments. He could only say the Mospheiran government wasn’t disposed to say no when the aiji approved a chance they’d looked to take, oh, a year to clear…

Mospheirans never had understood how fast the aiji could move when he wanted to.

The question was why the aiji wanted to.

The shuttle was still in testing; the payload for said test had been set and calculated to a fare-thee-well… one had to be atevi to fully comprehend just what manner of disruption such a change posed. Inconvenient, yes, but more to the point profoundly disturbing to a people whose culture revolved around felicitousnumerical associations. Change one kilo of payload, and the entire mission might need to be redesigned.

It was more than Barb’s maneuver that had his stomach in a knot.

He could imagine Lord Brominandi making his speech in the legislature: Let the fool humans risk their necks in a shuttle that had only made four prior flights. Mospheirans suddenly declared they wanted seats, just seats, nothing major in the way of baggage, Shawn had told him, no great additional mass… oh, let the shuttle just carry enough fuel. No great problem. No recalculation at all, oh, no, nothing of the kind.

He was appalled. Infuriated. It was hisshuttle, dammit, and even the possibility of a glitch-up and the loss of the shuttle turned his blood cold. God, the whole program set at incalculable risk. For what?

And Tabini cleared it to fly?

But the humans in orbit had called their interpreters home, first the one on Mospheira, which hadn’t alarmed anyone on the mainland. It was expected, though early.

And they’d thought nothing of it when, on the next turnaround with the only space shuttle in existence, thisturnaround, this last flight… they’d sent down a senior staffer from the station to replace, so he and Tabini had assumed, Yolanda Mercheson as the human-to-human paidhi.

But when Shawn so innocently announced that the station had called home the only other human being on the mainland, the only human being he had regular contact with, to go back to the ship that had sent him down… a fait accompli. No negotiation, no request, no concession to protocols or his plans…

Thathad been cause for alarm.