“Kellan,” Eli said.
Tessa waited. Her finger rested beside the first action on the shelter record, covering no part of the words.
“He was at the shelter before we reached it. Holding the route.” Eli looked toward the technician across the chamber and made himself leave the dead man’s face out of the present one. “Sera had the civilians moving.”
“What were we doing before that?”
“The core transport. We thought we could keep the contract.”
He remembered the weight of that calculation, months of expenses arranged around a payment large enough to let them stop choosing which need could wait. He did not need to recover the precise faces of the transport guards to know how much he had wanted them to agree. The offered laugh slid across that memory’s edge, bright and unrelated.
“Another guild took it,” he said. “The core and the bounty.”
“Yes.”
