The settlement adjacent to the arrival facility was called Drevhan — a word that didn't appear in the briefing document, which was either an oversight or a statement. It was small enough that "settlement" was probably generous: two dozen buildings arranged around a central square where a market operated in the mornings and a fire burned in the evenings. The buildings were functional and slightly organic-looking, their walls laced with biological growth that might have been architecture or might have been something living. The air smelled of soil and smoke and something underneath both that Taric couldn't name — sweet and faintly metallic, like pollen from a flower that had evolved wrong.

  He found a food stall and spent six Drenn on something that resembled stew and tasted better than it looked. He sat at the edge of the square and watched people move. Most of them looked like they had been here long enough to have stopped being surprised by anything.

  A few — identifiable by their grey clothes and careful eyes — were clearly new arrivals. One of them, a heavyset woman with cornrowed hair and an expression that had been stripped down to its essential bones, was sitting on the other side of the square with her briefing document pressed flat against her thighs and her lips moving. Not reading aloud. Working through something.

  Another new arrival — a thin man with a scholar's stoop and round, wire-framed glasses that he kept touching with one finger, adjusting them unnecessarily — had found the food stall before Taric but was sitting with his bowl untouched, staring at the middle distance in the way of someone who has been told something that requires all available processing capacity.

  "The broth is better here than at the eastern stall," said a voice beside him. "Less regenerative herb, which means it tastes like actual food instead of medicine."

  Taric looked up.

  The person who had sat beside him — apparently without any self-consciousness about doing so — was roughly his age, perhaps a year or two younger, with an open, slightly smudged face that had a quality of genuine attention: the look of someone who was actually interested in what was in front of him and not performing the interest. He had sandy-brown hair that had been roughly cut and was growing out unevenly, dark eyes with a quick intelligence in them, and hands that were calloused in the particular way of someone who spent time handling vegetation — the pads of the fingers stained faintly green, the knuckles toughened in patterns that a desk job wouldn't produce. He had a large worn pack leaning against the bench beside him, covered in exterior pockets, most of them labeled in a small, careful hand with names Taric didn't recognize. He was eating from a similar bowl and doing it in the way that relaxed people eat: without performing any version of himself for an audience.

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  Taric appreciated that.

  "Good to know," Taric said.

  "First day?" the other man asked.

  "That obvious?"

  "You're reading the square the same way I did when I arrived. Trying to figure out which parts of the information are true and which parts are the version of true that someone decided you should have." He shrugged. "I'm Dave."

  "Taric."

  They ate in companionable silence for a moment.

  "How long have you been here?" Taric asked.

  "Four months." Dave considered the question more carefully. "Long enough to know the difference between what the briefing says and what actually happens. Short enough that I'm still surprised sometimes."

  "What surprises you?"

  Dave looked at him sideways, assessing whether the question was genuine. "How much of it makes a certain kind of sense," he said finally. "The system. It's brutal, but it's not random. It has a logic. And once you understand the logic, you can—" He paused. "Well. Work with it, or around it. Depending on who you are."

  "Which do you do?"

  "Mostly around it." Dave gestured at his pack. "I collect medicinal herbs. Sell them to healers and apothecaries. It's not glamorous, but it pays enough to eat and sleep indoors, and it keeps me out of the parts of Cosmulo where the Clergy is paying close attention." He glanced at Taric's hands. "You have any skills from before?"

  Taric thought about that honestly. His hands, he noticed Dave noticing, were not a scholar's hands — the fingers were straight and strong, the grip reflexively tight, the kind of hands that expected to carry or climb or, when necessary, to hold onto something that didn't want to be held. "Nothing that maps cleanly onto herb-collecting," he said.

  Dave laughed — a genuine, quick sound. "That's fine. Most useful things here you learn after you arrive." He hesitated, then seemed to make a decision. "I'm heading out in two days. Expedition to the high slopes — there's an herb called silvar root that only grows above the frost line. It's worth significant Drenn to the right buyers. The route is manageable if you know it." Another pause. "I could use someone to watch my back. Split whatever we find."

  Taric looked at him. Dave met his eyes without flinching — not aggressive, not naive. Just a person extending a genuine offer and waiting to see what happened.

  "You don't know anything about me," Taric said.

  "I know you're new, which means you haven't had time to develop any particularly dangerous habits yet," Dave said. "And I know you asked a real question instead of a performing-normal question, which is rarer than you'd think." He picked up his bowl. "Think about it. I'll be at the eastern gate the morning after next, whether or not you're there."

  He finished his food and left without ceremony.

  Taric sat with the empty square and the idea of someone who had simply decided to offer help without making it complicated.

  Across the square, the thin man with the glasses had finally picked up his spoon. He looked at the stew, then at the fire burning in the center of the square, then at his briefing document. He put the spoon back down. He picked up the briefing document. He tore a small corner from the page.

  He looked at the torn corner for a long time. Then he pressed it flat again, and smoothed it, and put the document away, and picked up the spoon.

  Something about that gesture stayed with Taric longer than it should have.

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