"Traveler, there is no path. The path is made by walking."
— Antonio Machado, Proverbios y Cantares, 1912
The Spanish coast ca into view below the Granite Hawk's nose, pale sand and blue water giving way to the flat interior of Alria stretching inland. Luca had been watching it for twenty minutes from the pilot seat with his hands loose on the controls.
Behind him, the crew did what they did when they were airborne and tired. Ryan had a tablet. Danny had his notebook. Zoe was asleep on the copilot seat, or doing a convincing impression of it. Emily was still going through their courses on her tablet. Joey had produced a deck of cards from sowhere and was dealing to Chris across the corner of the table.
Erik had woken them at four in the morning, not as a punishnt or a demonstration, just because four in the morning was apparently when Erik thought useful things happened. He'd sent a ssage to their room the night before: 0400. Lobby. Bring the module. Chris had been there at 0355. Ryan had arrived at 0401 without saying anything about it.
The run had taken forty-five minutes through Geneva's pre-dawn streets. Erik lectured the whole ti. He'd said all of it before, probably many tis, and had zero interest in questions during the run. He'd covered threat posture, environntal scanning, how a room changed its texture when soone in it was watching you specifically, if you knew what to look for. Luca had been concentrating mostly on not dying, but so of it was landing. He could feel the difference in how he'd read the shuttle terminal that morning, and that was probably the point.
The greenhouse operations were visible below the wing now, row after row of white plastic sheeting running to the edge of sight. He'd been hoping they might at least fly over Madrid on the way. He'd never been to Spain before. He had a general idea that Spain ant old streets and good food, and the pictures he'd seen of Madrid looked like a place worth being in. But the Triumph needed closed-system hydroponics specialists and environntal engineers, and the people who actually knew how to do that were not in Madrid.
"I miss Izumi," Emily said.
"She's got logistics and recruitnt to do," Luca said. "She's probably happier."
"Probably," Emily agreed. She went back to her tablet.
Alria from the ground was less interesting than Alria from the air, which had not been especially interesting to begin with. He was running on four hours of sleep and the particular kind of tired that lived behind the eyes, and the sun was not helping. March in Spain and the sun was already aggressive about it. He'd squinted at the horizon and it was just more of the sa: white plastic sheeting and then more of it. Soone had looked at this land and decided the future was going to be functional before it was beautiful, and he understood that intellectually, but he'd been hoping for Madrid.
"Huh," Danny said, squinting at the nearest row of panels as they stepped off the shuttle.
Joey had his hand up against the sun, squinting hard. "I was expecting it to be more green."
"Inside," said their driver, who'd been waiting at the terminal with a small sign reading Triumph Initiative. He gestured toward the greenhouse blocks. "Inside is very green."
The driver was loading their bags into the back when his phone rang. He answered and looked at Luca. "Soone asking for you. UER Investigative Bureau, out of Geneva."
"I'm not available," Luca said.
The driver relayed it and put his phone away.
He'd call them back when he had sothing to say.
Zoe had her dagger on her hip. She'd put it there before they left Geneva and hadn't said anything about it, and nobody had said anything either. That was the right call. Luca had watched Chris do the terminal scan twice already.
He knew the na Titan Dynamics. What he didn't know was what they'd wanted from Danny specifically, how they'd known which hotel room to visit, or how big the operation actually was. Erik had given him a confirmation and a shrug and called it resolved. Karen was calling it his problem. He had a na with no structure behind it and a friend who'd spent three hours knocked out on the floor while soone went through his clothes.
He needed a corporate structure, a paper trail, sothing to actually work with. Until he had that, he had nothing useful to say to anyone.
The café was ten minutes from the terminal, nothing like a tourist venue, which Luca appreciated. It had its daily nu and a ceiling fan that moved the warm air without doing much about the temperature. They had three etings scheduled that morning.
The Sunwalkers arrived first. They were local, which ant they were already there when the crew landed and had already ordered coffee. Haranekoa had flown in from Bilbao. Al-Najma had co from Morocco.
Paco was the leader of the Sunwalkers, lean and tan, his face and forearms dark from the sun. He was a dical Ecologist by class. He introduced his team as they sat. Carn, Systems Ecologist, was watching them with professional interest. The others pulled up chairs and got their notebooks out.
These were people who didn't waste ti.
He let them talk for twenty minutes before he asked the real one.
"Walk through what you'd grow," he said. "On the ship."
Paco started in on yield optimization, crop rotation, the Earth staples. Luca shook his head.
"What you'd actually be growing. This is ship hydroponics. Closed system. Two-year voyage." He set his coffee down. "And when we reach our destination, whatever we grow there stays separate from the native ecosystem. We're not introducing Earth biology into an alien biosphere. We're not seeding an alien world with Earth plants. That's not sothing we're doing. We'll dosticate native plants rather than importing anything."
The table went quiet.
"The principles are the sa," Paco said. "The plants are just different."
Luca picked his coffee back up.
Carn had turned to Emily, sothing about lighting cycles, but she was still following the main conversation. She looked up. "Your water loop is the hardest part of what you're describing. Closed-circuit for two years with no resupply. I'd want to see your specs before I said anything useful."
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Haranekoa arrived for the second eting while the Sunwalkers were finishing their coffees. Luca had arranged the overlap deliberately.
The Sunwalkers were relaxed about it. Paco and Iker knew each other from the regional delving circuit. They shook hands and moved on. Paco caught Luca's eye on the way out and pointed toward the greenhouse block. Luca nodded. They'd get it set up.
Haranekoa was Basque. Iker led the group. They sat down and got to the substance. Their work was nanotech and structural engineering, applied rather than theoretical. It covered portal architecture and field fabrication, essentially field engineering, which got Ryan excited. Their record across four years was as good as anything Luca had seen on the tour.
The conversation was enjoyable. He liked talking to people who didn't perform for their audience.
Then he asked them about a command disagreent.
"If two of your mbers have a conflict over an approach," he said, "and you need a resolution fast, how do you handle it?"
Iker's answer was thorough. He talked about how the team talked to each other, how they wrote things down, how they worked it out. It was genuinely thoughtful. It was also not what Luca had asked.
The café owner appeared at Luca's elbow. "Excuse . A call. On the line. For a Rossi." He gestured at the bar. "They say UER Investigative Bureau. Out of Geneva."
"I'm in a eting," Luca said. "I'll call them back."
The owner nodded and went back to the bar.
Al-Najma arrived a few minutes early for the third eting, having flown in from Morocco.
Tariq walked into the café and within ninety seconds the room was warr. It wasn't a technique. He just looked genuinely glad to be there, and it registered without him doing anything visible to cause it. His team ca in behind him, all of them relaxed in the specific way of people who weren't waiting for Tariq to tell them how to stand.
They'd adapted desert survival techniques to portal environnts and gained experience around conditions most engineering teams never planned for. Fatima was a Desert Ecologist, which on paper ant soil composition and heat-adapted biology, but in practice ant she was the one who figured out what a portal environnt was actually doing to the ground before anyone else thought to ask.
When Tariq laughed, he ant it. When he was serious, that was equally clear. Luca spent most of the eting asking questions and watching him listen.
They were good at hard things and had gone looking for harder ones.
The eting ended with strong handshakes and no commitnts from either side, which was exactly how it was supposed to go. What stuck was the drive, people who'd hit the level cap and wanted more. That was the thing he kept looking for and rarely found twice in the sa room.
The greenhouse was enormous in a way that stopped making sense after the first hundred ters.
From the air it had looked like a lot of plastic. From the inside it looked like soone had built a city and replaced every building with plants. He was tired and his eyes hurt from the sun and he was going to be here for two hours.
Joey stopped two steps inside and looked up at the ceiling array. "Okay," he said. "This is actually incredible."
Danny was already moving. He and Carn had fallen into conversation before they'd crossed the threshold and it hadn't stopped. Luca watched him gesture at a panel junction and ask sothing, watched him take three steps toward a secondary corridor to get a better look at sothing on the ceiling.
Luca watched Danny move through the greenhouse like the world was interesting and not dangerous. He didn't let himself think too hard about what that ant right now.
Luca was standing near the east entrance. He'd counted three ways out from the floor plan, spotted a loading bay you couldn't see from inside unless you knew to look, and a maintenance passage along the north wall that he didn't love. The crew was distributed across the structure and all visible. Zoe had positioned herself between him and the loading bay. The dagger was still on her hip.
He made himself focus on Paco, who was explaining nutrient cycling at altitude to Chris and using his hands to show scale.
He didn't make any commitnts. He told Paco he'd be in touch, and he ant it.
As the Sunwalkers gathered near the exit, he leaned toward Emily. "Anything you want to do tonight?"
She thought about it for two seconds. "Flanco. If there's sowhere to hear it."
He caught Paco at the door. "Anywhere worth going for flanco? Not a tourist place."
Paco didn't have to think. "La Chancla. Old Alria." He pulled out his notebook, tore off a corner, wrote an address. "Don't dress up. Dinner doesn't start until ten."
Luca had been planning to eat at eight, yet Spain had other ideas.
La Chancla was a gitano neighborhood in a part of the city that predated the greenhouses by several centuries. The streets were narrow, the buildings low and whitewashed, laundry strung between windows. Paco was already outside when they arrived, leaning against the wall with his hands in his pockets, and he walked them.
The street outside was full of people at ten at night, which apparently nobody found unusual.
They pushed two tables together. In Alria you ordered drinks and the food arrived on its own, which was not how it worked anywhere Luca had been before. Alhambra beers ca out cold and sweating. A tinto de verano appeared in front of Emily: red wine, soda, and ice. She looked at Carn, who shrugged like it was obvious. Then the tapas arrived: patatas bravas with sauce that was actually spicy, jamón ibérico on small rounds of bread, and a clay dish of migas, breadcrumbs fried with garlic and chorizo, the sort of food that had no business being as good as it was.
Paco put a small plate in front of him without ceremony: sliced tomato, olive oil, a pinch of salt. Nothing else. Luca ate one and stopped. He'd been eating tomatoes his whole life. He was not sure he'd ever actually had one before.
Emily's cheeks went rosy after the first glass. Luca shifted his chair closer and she found his hand under the table.
Paco's phone lit up on the table between the migas and the jamón. He looked at the screen, then at Luca. "UER Investigative Bureau. Geneva."
Luca looked at it for a mont.
"Don't," he said.
Paco declined it and put the phone face-down.
A man set up a classical guitar in the corner and started playing. Nobody stopped talking.
Luca caught Ryan's eye across the table. One tilt of his head toward the door.
Ryan finished his beer and excused himself. Zoe was already on her feet. The guitarist had the room.
The Territory Control Tower was a ten-minute walk east. Titan Dynamics had a na and no face and no paper trail, and Ryan needed a computer to find one.
Joey, anwhile, had asked Paco how the System had co to Alria.
"The early days," he said, were bad. "The portals opened without warning across the south, the sa as everywhere, but Andalucia had been caught without the infrastructure that so of the northern cities had managed to throw together. The overflow events in the first two years killed a lot of people. Monsters coming through portals that weren't managed fast enough, spilling into streets that had no walls."
"The castles," Carn said. "That was the first thing. Everyone laughed at first. Like, why are we hiding in a castle, it's the twenty-first century." She sipped her beer. "Then you see what cos out of a Level 9 overflow event and suddenly the castle makes sense."
Spain had thousands of them, Reconquista-era fortifications that had been standing for five hundred years, seven hundred, so over fourteen hundred years, most of them barely maintained. The walls were thick stone, the positions defensible, the sightlines clear.
"My uncle's family held a castle in Jaén for eleven months," Paco said. "Forty-three people."
Luca hadn't thought about it that way. He'd grown up with the System too, but New Hampshire didn't have castles. They'd had the Sandworth IFC compound and a lot of forest and no real defensive positions besides what they could to fortify the town.
"And now?" Chris asked.
Paco set his beer down. "Now, central Spain is covered. Territory control towers back to back. East too, most of it. You can drive from Madrid to Valencia and you won't find any active portals." He paused. "The northwest is different. Galicia, Asturias. The Portuguese north. Those are controlled areas. That's where the teams that still want to level go."
"Where you leveled?" Luca asked.
Carn nodded. "Two years in Galicia. Before the Alria work. The portals there cap at 32, sa as anywhere, but the overflow events run deep and the terrain is brutal. Cold, wet, nothing like here." She looked at her hands. "Worth it."
The guitarist shifted into sothing slower. A woman in a red dress with white polka dots stepped out from sowhere near the back and started to dance, the heels coming down hard and deliberate on the wooden floor. The dress moved when she turned. Luca had seen flanco on a screen once and thought he'd understood what it was.
Emily was laughing at sothing Carn had said, her head tipped back, the tinto de verano almost gone.
He looked at Emily again. She caught him and raised her glass. He raised his beer back.
Two chairs were empty at the far end of the table. Paco hadn't noticed, or maybe he had.
Tomorrow was Italy. Tonight, Ryan would be digging into Titan Dynamics.
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