But it was honest, and it built, slowly, a small buffer of genuine credit against the day he'd finally need to pay Renna back in full, and more than that, it gave him something Cael Athis had rarely offered — the strange, quiet comfort of routine, of knowing exactly what each day would ask of him and exactly what he'd have to show for it by the day's end.
In the evenings, once his shift ended and exhaustion set in, he continued testing the pull — riding transit lifts to the Anchorage's furthest accessible points, twice more securing cheap shuttle passage to Calder's Rest and, on one occasion, to the amber-clouded world the local charts labelled Aurent's Reach, each new reading logged carefully alongside the others, each one sharpening, incrementally, the narrow cone of possible bearings his crude triangulation had first suggested.
