They left Drevhan at first light. The eastern gate was a functional thing — two reinforced posts and a bar that could be raised or lowered, manned by a single bored-looking guard who barely glanced at them before waving them through.

  But there was someone else at the gate.

  He was standing a little to the side — not blocking the way, not in uniform that announced anything clearly, but in the cream-and-pale-grey layered clothing that the Clergy's lower ranks wore off-duty. He was perhaps thirty, lean, with a scholar's face that had been sharpened by something more practical than scholarship. He carried a small case — medical-grade, Taric noted, the kind used for biological sampling equipment. He was watching the departing newcomers with the patient attention of a naturalist observing a watering hole.

  His eyes passed over Dave — a quick check, dismissed — and settled on Taric for a fraction of a second longer. Not a confrontational assessment. A professional one. The kind you do when you're cataloguing.

  Then he looked away.

  "Missionary," Dave said, very quietly, once they were past the gate. He didn't look back. "There's one stationed here most mornings for the first two weeks after an intake arrival. They monitor the departure patterns — who leaves early, who stays, who goes toward the high terrain." A pause. "What they're really doing is watching for residual IC bleed from anyone who came in already unstable. The overnight period sometimes triggers it."

  "He looked at me," Taric said.

  "He looked at everyone. He looked at you slightly longer because—" Dave adjusted his pack without breaking stride. "Because you have a certain quality when you move. Like you're accounting for things that might come at you from the side. People who grew up in normal circumstances don't walk like that. People with active biology sometimes do."

  Taric considered this. "Should I be concerned?"

  "Not today. One look from a Missionary isn't an action. It's a note." Dave glanced at him sidelong. "Just don't discharge anything visible until we're past the settlement boundary."

  Taric noted this.

  Beyond the gate, the landscape opened into something that didn't quite resemble anything Taric had a word for. The terrain was natural — hills, sparse woodland, rocky outcroppings — but it had an underlying quality that felt purposeful, as though it had been arranged rather than grown. Plants grew in patterns that weren't quite random. The light was slightly off in ways he couldn't specify. And over everything, faint but persistent, was a sense of being measured.

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  "The system monitors everything," Dave said, as though he had read Taric's expression. He didn't look up from the path. "The SG percentage — it tracks. It knows when you've had significant biological events, when you've been in combat, when your physiology is changing. You don't feel the monitoring directly, but you feel its effects."

  "And you find that—?"

  "I find it the way I find weather. It's there. Acting like it isn't doesn't help."

  They walked in comfortable silence for a while. Dave had a natural rhythm to his movement — unhurried but covering ground efficiently, pausing regularly to scan the terrain around them with eyes that had clearly learned where to look. Taric found himself doing the same, and realized after a few hours that they had developed an informal coordination: Dave watching ahead and to the left, Taric watching ahead and to the right, both of them peripherally monitoring their respective flanks.

  They hadn't discussed this. It had simply happened.

  "Tell me about the monsters," Taric said around midday.

  Dave chewed thoughtfully. "Cosmulo's biological system produces them. Some are natural — animals that have evolved along the same genetic lines as humans, but in different directions. Some are—" He hesitated. "Some are things that went wrong. Evolutionary failures. IC overload — that's Cellular Instability — can push a person's biology past the threshold into something that isn't quite human anymore. The Clergy calls them Aberrations. They don't advertise their existence."

  "Have you seen one?"

  "Once. From a distance." He said it flatly. "It was enough."

  "And in the high slopes?"

  "Mostly natural fauna. Territorial, but predictable if you understand the behavior." He reached into his pack and produced two short, dense clubs of reinforced bone. He handed one to Taric. "Standard wildlife deterrent."

  Taric turned it over in his hands. It was heavier than it looked — treated with something that had hardened the bone beyond what nature would manage alone. He held it naturally, with the ease of someone whose hands knew how to be the last argument in a conversation. He set it in his pack.

  The sky was clear and slightly wrong in its shade of blue.

  "Weather permitting," Taric agreed.

  By the time they made camp at the edge of the treeline, where the slopes began in earnest, Taric had a clearer sense of what Cosmulo was in practice versus theory. The theory was a system of evolutionary development, precisely managed and rationally organized. The practice was two people with bone clubs sleeping at the foot of a mountain that was home to something that had watched them for twenty minutes from the tree line and decided, for reasons of its own, to let them pass.

  Taric lay down and looked at the sky — wrong-blue fading to black, scattered with stars whose constellations he didn't recognize. Above him, the mountain rose in darkness, patient and enormous.

  He didn't dream.

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