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leader? No, of course not. Look, I need you to
talk
.”
    The old man watched her intently. All at once he began a flow of words. How had he known? It went on for a few minutes while the guard, expressionless, watched. People also watched from the ramparts, a circle of silent and wary eyes. It spooked Cam a little. But then the translator began to whisper fragments into her ear: “Come from . . . sky . . . peace . . . soldier . . . you . . . Are you a soldier come from Pular?
Cooz
.”
    “Cooz,”
Cam said aloud, parroting the translator and assuming the word meant “no.”
    “From where? . . . Sky . . . where?”
    “From the sky, yes,” she subvocalized and then repeated the sounds in her implant. “I’m not from here.” She watched those navy-blue-and-speckled-silver eyes sharpen even more. Complete incomprehension on the soldier’s face, although he didn’t look stupid.
    Rem Aveo was speaking a language the soldier didn’t know.
    She let him ask several more questions but didn’t answer, letting the translator process vocabulary and grammar. Then Cam pointed to things, encouraging him to name them, to offer her sentences about them. She tried to look as if she understood but simply chose not to say anything herself, but it was clear he wasn’t fooled. Finally the soldier spoke sharply. The old man turned to him and spoke, and Cam’s implant translated, “She is Pulari. She doesn’t speak our language.”
    The tricky old son of a gun.
    But what should she do? She didn’t even know if the translator could handle two separate languages; the Atoners hadn’t said. Fuck! Why hadn’t they prepared her better? Well, she would just have to do the best she could.
    She said to Rem Aveo, “I am not Pulari. But you want this soldier to believe I am Pulari.”
    If he was startled, he didn’t show it. “Yes,” he said. “It is kulith.”
    The translator offered her nothing.
    He said quietly, “You don’t know kulith.”
    No, but the soldier did. He had the look of a man who finally recognized one word in a sea of incomprehensibility. Aveo said more words, many more, and the translator finally offered, “Strategy. Life or death strategy.”
    “Whose death?” Cam said.
    “Mine,” Aveo said. He looked at her with those sad, shrewd eyes, and all at once Cam realized he was younger than she’d first thought. The sadness and boniness and gray hair had misled her. But there was strength in his gaze, his stance, his natural authority. Middle-aged maybe, but no more.
    She said, “If I am not Pulari, you will die?”
    “It is not that simple.”
    She smiled. “It never is,” she said, all at once feeling wise and powerful. This poor man. Why not play along, until she had the situation better figured out? She had to pretend to be from somewhere; pretending to be Pulari could save a life. And if the translator could handle both languages, then maybe the ones not speaking “Pulari” would talk more freely in front of her, and who knew what she might learn that way?
    “Pulari,” she said to the soldier, and pointed to her own chest. Then, in English, “Hello.”
     
    CAM WALKED THROUGH A WOODEN GATE and out of the shuttle enclosure. The pale-eyed soldier must be more than just a bodyguard, might even be some sort of commander; he said something and more soldiers fell in behind them in perfect rows, perfectly quiet. As they moved through neat, cleanly raked dirt streets between straight rows of tents, the silence began to unnerve her. She glimpsed nonmilitary people, men and women and even a few children, but none of them made any noise, either. All were bare chested, even the women. Most wore skirts of various colors and lengths, but some were completely naked. Nobody looked happy. Because of her?
    Then a child threw a rock.
    Cam just happened to look up as the small brown arm let fly. The boy—or maybe it was a girl, she couldn’t tell—perched on top of an earthen wall. The throw was awkward,