THE LAST GREEN HOUR

The Council

The supply Pilgrimage was eleven days out when the council called its first full emergency session, and Mara attended only because Hale physically appeared at her clinic door and told her, with the flat patience of a man who had learned not to waste words on people too tired to argue, that her presence was not optional.

The council house held nine members around a table built from packing crates, and forty or so colonists crowded the walls behind them—Halcyon's population had not yet reached three hundred, and news in a colony that size traveled with the speed and weight of gossip in a village, which was, Mara reflected, essentially what they were: a village, eighty-nine million years removed from the nearest other human settlement on the planet, which did not yet exist and would not for a very long time.

Councilwoman Odalys Ferreira, formerly a logistics director for Aegis Corp and now, by the peculiar democracy of a colony too new to have proper elections, its de facto chair, opened the session with the kind of grim efficiency Mara had come to recognize as the only tone the colony's leadership seemed to have.

"Three items," Ferreira said. "Perimeter security, following two further Dusk-runner sightings. Medical resource projections, following Dr. Voss's report this morning. And a supply update from the Bridge relay team, which I'll take last because it's the only one that isn't bad news, and I'd like something to end on."

The security discussion ran long and grim: Hale's assessment that the Dusk-runner pack—because it was, they'd now confirmed, a pack, not a lone animal—had begun testing the fence line at three separate points, probing rather than attacking, in a pattern that suggested either coordinated hunting behavior or, more troublingly, simple learning. It had figured out where the fence was. It had not yet figured out how to get past it. Nobody in the room found much comfort in the distinction.

The medical discussion was worse. Mara laid out the antibiotic timeline in numbers stark enough that even Ferreira, who had built a career on not reacting visibly to bad projections, went quiet for a moment before asking the only question that mattered: "What happens on day forty, if the supply Pilgrimage is delayed?"

"Anyone with a serious infection after that point," Mara said, "we treat with what the old world called folk medicine, and modern medicine calls a shortage. Some people live. Some don't. I can't give you better numbers than that, because I don't have better numbers to give."

Nobody in the room said anything for a long moment. Then Ferreira nodded, once, the particular nod of a woman filing away a horror for later processing because there was no room in the present schedule to feel it now, and moved to the final item.

"Bridge relay confirms transit window in eleven days, as scheduled. Manifest for the supply Pilgrimage runs forty-two personnel and cargo—medical resupply, agricultural equipment, and twelve new colonists cleared under the secondary lottery draw." She glanced down at a printed sheet. "I have the passenger manifest here, if anyone wants to check for family members expected to follow."

Mara was on her feet before she'd consciously decided to stand.

"Reyes," she said. "D. Reyes. Please."

Ferreira scanned the list, and Mara watched her face, hunting for any flicker of an answer before the words came, the way she'd learned to read incoming trauma patients before the chart caught up to the wound.

"I don't have a Reyes on this manifest," Ferreira said, and the words landed on Mara's chest with a weight disproportionate to their number, four small syllables carrying eleven days of hope she had not let herself examine too closely until this exact moment. "I'm sorry, Dr. Voss. There may be later Pilgrimages scheduled. I can have the relay team check for him on future manifests, if you'd like."

"Please," Mara said. Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "Please do that."

She sat back down. Beside her, unnoticed until now, Hale had gone very still, watching her with an expression that was not quite pity—he did not, she was learning, deal much in pity—but something adjacent to it, a recognition of a wound he'd apparently decided was not his place to touch, but also not his place to ignore.

"He'll be on one," Hale said quietly, once the session moved on. "Eleven days is nothing. There are dozens of Pilgrimages queued behind this one."

"You don't know that."

"No," Hale agreed. "But it costs nothing to say, and it's more true than not, statistically, so I said it." He paused. "For what it's worth, I looked into the checkpoint mixups. They happen more than Aegis likes to admit. Manifest errors, mostly—paperwork lag between departments who don't talk to each other. It's bureaucratic incompetence, not malice. That's not nothing, if it's your brother-in-law standing on the wrong side of that particular distinction."

It was, Mara found, the single kindest thing anyone in Halcyon had said to her since the crossing—not comfort exactly, but information, offered with the same clean precision he offered everything, because he had correctly guessed that precision was the only currency she had energy left to spend.

"Thank you," she said, and meant it more than the two words could really carry.