“Only one way to find out.”
They walked slowly, warily. The portal behind them did not open again. Concordance, it seemed, did not possess a metakey of their own, did not know the secret of the archways.
Or, she thought, maybe they did, and were happy for her and Ondo to take the walk they were taking.
One hundred metres along, equidistant between the two archways, she paused. Part of her brain was scanning for threats but another part had bubbled up a question from nowhere. She might not get chance to ask him again. And perhaps she simply wanted to hear his voice in the still quiet of the alien structure. Speaking over the comms link, she said, “My father … how well did he know Marita and your daughter?”
Ondo took a moment to react to the conversational switch. He stopped to look at h
