Fedora found him after dark on the ridge above the camp, which was where he went when he required the specific kind of solitude that did not actually involve being alone and would have preferred to be found.
She did not announce herself. She simply arrived at the flat outcrop of rock he had claimed and sat down beside him with her shoulder approximately two inches from his, close enough that the gap registered as a decision rather than an accident.
Below them the camp held its small circle of banked firelight. Above them the sky had the particular clarity that altitude produced, stars in a density that the capital's light had never permitted him to see, and the moon in its waning phase moving steadily toward the night when there would be no moon at all.
'Sixteen days,' Fedora said.
'Fifteen, after midnight.'
'Fifteen, after midnight.' She let that sit. 'You have been up here for two hours.'
'I've been thinking.'
