Author's Note: You probably already noticed that this chapter is massive compared to the others. That's because I'm enrolled in the Wordswithout school of dialogue and characterization. She's teaching me to make people sound like people, while I try to make sure they still sound like supersoldiers.

This story has become more and more important in my life lately, not least because it's become such a large undertaking. I'm very invested in it and I'd like to thank the people who have helped out by reviewing and just being there, SurferSquid especially.

Also, the rest of the chapters now have titles just so that this one could have the title it does.

XXI

Halsey sat back on her heels. She hunched, as if to settle further into her white, puffy parka. The air was the exact same temperature it had been when Six had fallen asleep: a damp, pure coolness. Six remembered learning that there were two kinds of caves: those that were alive and those that were finished. If they were alive, water was still flowing. It was still shaping the rocks. Caves like that were more dangerous to walk into: something in the process of forming could break off with the application of the right pressure or a chance movement of the tons of rock surrounding each precariously empty room. Live caves needed to be monitored. They moved.

Dormant caves had finished growing. The water or other forces that had formed them had gone elsewhere. They were settled comfortably into their places and would not change at all unless something drastic forced the rocks to shift. This kind of cave was safer to travel in, although without ecosystems involving mostly mushrooms, salamanders, and blind, wandering fish they would also be harder to survive in unaided.

That was a moot point, though. The human body could not live off the careful, slow reserves of lightless energy used by the things in caves.

The cave the Sangheili had tattooed with their runes was dormant.

The air still felt cold in a way that reminded Six of water.

The few symbols that Halsey had drawn on the ground still waited there. Six crossed her legs and sat down, creating a lose circle around the runes with Jorge and Fred on either side of her. They were towering, and even next to Six Halsey looked tiny. Six thought that the doctor had looked stronger, more solid, when she'd imperiously handed Six the AI to be carried to the Pillar of Autumn.

Six wondered whether Halsey was hiding how strongly she missed that AI too. At least Cortana was still alive...probably.

If Halsey felt any regret about losing her AI, though, she wasn't showing it now. She continued to explain the runes. "These symbols are similar to the ones on the walls, but not a part of the same alphabet. From information I've gotten off of Sangheili armor and the dashboards I get pictures of when you Spartans capture Covenant vehicles, we can see that there is a modern version of the language used in the Elites' conversations, along with a ritual language used on the armor and buildings they consider sacred. Because this is the one group of people I'm sure ONI could not infiltrate I can also tell you that I have seen symbols like this before. I was sent an image of a hologram: it's where I saw these symbols." She pointed to the circles and curls on the ground. "It was some kind of object from an alien species that predates the Covenant, and it is the latchkey discovery I told Noble Team about. The object that Relk found might be a component of this artifact."

So this was why Noble Team had had their fight in the snowy, kilometers-deep sinkhole underneath Reach's surface. Halsey hadn't wanted to explain what it was she was doing down there, but it seemed like the circumstances had changed. Halsey didn't want to be like ONI, leading everyone else on blindly.

That was preferable.

Six could clearly imagine Halsey using this same tone of voice and diction in a lecture hall to teach the Spartan-IIs. Kurt and Mendez had left the most of the threes' classroom work to dumb AI and computers. Jorge would have had a completely different experience from her, growing up with Halsey. She wanted to ask him what it had been like, and whether he ever thought that the threes were missing something because they hadn't had Halsey there, but it wasn't something she knew how to start to talk about.

Thinking about Jorge and reconsidering the mention of sacred places jarred something in her memory. "They burned a mark like this into the surface of the planet," she said. "We walked past it right after Relk turned on us for the first time."

Jorge nodded, his face set in a grim expression. "They left this big glass shape on the plains north of the shipyard."

Halsey said, "That makes sense."

It's horrible...Six thought, but it makes sense.

Halsey continued. "That language is like Greek would be to us, or even Sanskrit. It's a mark of something being old. That's why Relk couldn't help up to read it. It's also why this doesn't help us communicate with him, even though it is our area of expertise, if we can even be said to have one in xenolinguistics. I believe that all the spoken Covenant languages are written like this, although the different species have different spoken words. Jorge, what did you learn about the Sangheili while you were traveling with Relk?"

"Ma'am, I have portions of the trip recorded. Do we have something to play them back on?"

"Yes." Halsey stood up. "That would be invaluable."

She went to her equipment and retrieved a small holographic tablet and a thick cord. Jorge handed his helmet to her and she hooked its data port to the tablet, leaving the helmet sitting on the ground next to the runes and looking like it had sprouted a tail.

Jorge said, "They were mostly made so that I could get an idea of the area, but Relk sometimes talked about things, and pointed them out."

"Good." Halsey began extracting images of landscapes. Six could see her screen change, but would have had to crane her neck intrusively to get a clearer view. The trees and mountains she could see were yellow-cast from the screen, and frustratingly lacking in detail. How alien were they, really? Just how far had Jorge travelled away from her?

Jorge kept looking at Halsey, but he did give Six some of the explanation she wanted. "We stayed in the woods, avoiding houses. It didn't seem like a very developed part of the planet. Good farmland." He leaned forward, armor shifting. "Relk seemed to talk a lot about the farmers."

Halsey said, "Building a vocabulary from these words might be the best way to teach him. Simple word games and matching what he says to what we say will build the ways we can communicate."

The four of them leaned closer as the video played, including tinny sound. Jorge would occasionally comment giving context, explaining how in one situation Relk had seemed to be naming a direction, and in another warning that Elites were passing nearby. Six saw purple-leaved bushes with thick leaves and green veins crowding narrow paths made of tiny, raked, tan pebbles.

Halsey said, "There, he obviously said 'Sangheili'."

It was garbled but recognizable. The elite language had as many honks and growls as syllables that could be translated directly into English.

After half an hour they had a decent list of nouns and verbs that Relk had said and that could be scraped out on the dirt in English characters. Halsey sat back again, finally moving from what had looked like an uncomfortable crouch. She sat down and wiped her dusty hands on her pants. "The most important things to know are the nouns and verbs. We can speak in pidgin Sangheili if we have to. The grammar will be beyond us for now, but basic forms can be communicated on the battlefield just as well."

Jorge said, "I don't expect we'll be fighting beside him."

"Nah," Jun said. "It's Relk. You can't fight beside him without running away."

Six glanced over at the sleeping Elite. The Spartans' words were joking, as if they were talking about a younger brother.

Halsey didn't seem to notice the joke. Her eyes were icy behind her glasses. "We need communication. The artifact he found is the key to everything on this planet, and the only way to properly study it is to get back to civilization, past whatever army is waiting for us. It is even more imperative now that we get out of here quickly...and preferably safely. This work is a basis for doing that. Now, go wake up the Elite."

They all stood up. Jorge stretched, managing to look as if deciphering alien languages had been the most relaxing thing in the world. Jun still had the long, spindly sniper rifle magnetized to his back: he touched it with one hand as if to make sure it was still there while he helped Halsey up with the other hand. Six headed toward the awkwardly draped form of Relk. She wasn't a huge fan of the idea of waking a sleeping Elite; at least, not with a knife in her hand. The last time she'd assassinated one had been right on the edge of a cliff, on a mission that Noble Team had completed almost silently. She still remembered the green of the grass and the blue of the sky, shadowed by early-morning darkness.

As it turned out, she didn't have to dissipate that memory to wake Relk up. He must have been a light sleeper. He sat up as the humans approached, eyes fixing on Six's uncovered face. His mouthparts opened wide to show pink skin; strange, thin rows of pointed teeth; and stretching membranes between the four jawbones. He had no tongue.

A moment later, though, the mouthparts rearranged and settled into the familiar, gray, much less toothy Relk expression that Six was used to. He muttered.

Jorge moved to stand beside Six and looked up at Relk. "We're gonna teach you some things."

Relk said, "What?"

Into the surprised silence Jun said, "Right. He already knows that one."

Vinh found Kelly sitting on a crate, caulking her armor. Her chest plates looked normal, hiding the nearly fatal damage beneath. One gauntlet, though, had developed a crack. Kelly carefully filled in the ruptures with the caulk tube held in her right hand. Her red hair was spiky and uneven, and her forehead sweaty, but her face and lips had healthy color. Vinh kept her own helmet on. Her hair, black and slightly longer than Kelly's, was comfortably flattened and tucked against her neck. She had parted it and tied it into two separate tails at the back to let her armor and her AI port touch and communicate. She didn't currently have an AI, and had not in fact been cleared for the end-stage modifications she would need to run one. But still, the port helped her armor read her vital signs. It was protected with soft docking points, but getting hair involved with the electronics could still produce some pretty noticeable shocks. Parting the hair around it was a much better idea.

She wanted to keep the helmet on to be sure no Covenant crept down the hallways without anyone being able to pick it up on their radar. Jorge and the threes took their helmets off so often she wasn't sure why they'd been issued any, and the rest of the team was still asleep. Someone had to be alert.

Vinh, though, had woken up worried about Kelly. Her own injuries had been patched: fingers wrapped by Will when he was done with his own, but she still ached. Kelly had it worse. Now she stood in front of the older woman with her arms crossed and stared down the thick, green jaw plates of her helmet. "How are you feeling?"

Kelly's expression was all business. "Like I've been turned inside out."

"Your voice..."

"Won't be this tiny forever. Doctor Halsey says I'll have it back in a few days." Kelly set the caulk down beside her leg.

"It can't be worse than the augmentations."

"That was a long time ago, Vinh. It's weird in a completely different way to know that Halsey dropped your lung in a hallway somewhere so it wouldn't attract animals."

"Ugh."

"But I'm still alive." She shrugged.

"Are you ready to fight?"

"I will be soon."

Vinh looked toward the group of people talking on the other side of the cave. She had skirted them before coming over here. "They're trying to speak Elite. You think that'll help?"

"Maybe."

"We should be moving on. If, I mean, if you can."

"Halsey will tell us when it's time."

"She doesn't seem too concerned with the troops above our heads."

"You've always been ready to jump into things," Kelly said matter-of-factly.

Arguing felt very natural to Vinh. They were trapped in a cave while aliens invaded the planet. There weren't many ways to make that better, so she might as well make it worse. She sighed. "That's just because we have a war to win."

"You think we can't deal with them?" Kelly's tone was perfectly even. Her voice was quiet and tired, but that didn't make it any less conversational.

Vinh was taken aback. Kelly had noticed that she was probing for answers, and for cracks in morale. She had come over because she was concerned, but it was hard to stay that way when Kelly was her old untouchable self. Vinh liked walls to push against. "We dealt with them on Mestopheles. We dealt with them on Harbor. I dealt with them just like any of your teams did, and I know exactly what I'm dealing with here. I'm just not sure you do." Her voice was growing louder, more growly as the speakers dealt with it.

Vinh wondered why she'd worried.

Kelly stood up. She was three hundred pounds of near-silence in the pine-green MJOLNIR armor still dusted with Reach dirt and Reach underground. She was slightly taller than Vinh, her shoulders the same width down to the half inch.

Kelly said, "When I said you were always ready to jump into things, I meant things like this. Don't try to argue me down, Vinh."

Vinh looked around, unconsciously judging how much room she had to move in. Kelly tipped her head. She was doing the same thing.

Vinh said, "Obviously you're feeling better. So now I don't have to care any more."

Kelly picked up the caulk. She sat down and started ministering to her arm again, conveying more uncaring than Vinh could manage.

Vinh glanced over at Isaac, her usual conversation partner. He never minded when she argued. He just shrugged it off like his armor was made to repel it. He didn't even have to try to laugh it off like Will did.

Isaac treated Vinh's anger like Kelly treated her own pain.

He was asleep now, propped up against the wall.

Vinh headed for the group of people sitting with the Elite.

Jorge sat down beside Relk. He looked comfortable, giving the cave a warmth that Six would never have expected to find.

Then Halsey sat down on the other side of Relk, folding her knees beneath her in a way that Six's armor made impossible. Halsey turned the holographic tablet around to show it to Relk.

Six, Fred, and Jun sat down as well. Moving aside to let Fred complete the circle, Six's knee brushed against Jorge's; she left it there.

Relk looked nervously between the five of them, jaws parting in and out as he breathed. His eyes got wide like a human's did when he was nervous, the universal adaptation to fear being desire to see and understand more of it. Halsey held the tablet close enough to him that it glowed against his face.

"I need you to name things," she said. She spoke slowly and clearly, but that wasn't unusual for her. Part of the difficulty of dealing with Halsey was that she always sounded a bit like she doubted your skills in English. "Items, places...any of this." She reached across and paused the video.

Relk did not repeat his "What." At first he was hesitant, but as Halsey did not interrupt him he caught on quickly, pointing to things in the image and naming them. Six had trouble thinking of him as anything besides an animal, but Jun had suggested that Relk had also understood the need for communication on their small mission together. In their circle, the Spartans leaned closer to see what Relk was indicating.

One claw tapped the screen. "Aowha."

Halsey pointed as well. "Tree."

Relk pointed out other objects-fences, the path- while Halsey repeated them in English. Jorge was trying to pronounce the alien words; Six could see his mouth moving.

Once he and Halsey were playing the video forward and exchanging words at a brisk rate, Relk grew more enthusiastic and starting pointing to things outside the screen. Halsey tried to keep up by taking the computer back and recording the words. She started asking him to slow down, getting him to repeat things instead of going on to more so that the vocabulary could settle in. Relk started adding words, saying 'zhe' at the beginning of each sentence.

Halsey said, "What does that mean? Zhe?"

Relk repeated, "Zhe aowha."

"That's the 'to be' verb, isn't it? It means...that's what the word is?"

"Is," Relk said. He nodded, and slowly babbled something with a 'zhe' in it. "Is."

"That could be the 'to be' verb." Halsey seemed to gain energy just by suggesting it. "Zhe Relk?"

Relk nodded.

Halsey actually smiled. It was like a glacier cracking. "This is invaluable."

Six looked aside as Fred spoke. "We should teach him more useful words: commands and things like that."

Halsey said, "I am afraid it's a little too early for that. We barely know the sentence structure. We have established that verbs usually begin sentences, and are placed before their objects like in English."

"Got that from our recordings, did you?" Jorge asked.

"Yes, and the few that ONI shared."

"The Elites say 'wort' a lot. That means 'move', or something like. He used it enough to get us off roads or out of cover."

His voice going quiet, as if he were ashamed, Relk said, "Wort."

"Mo-oo-ve," Jun said, drawing out the sounds. He mimed walking with his fingers.

Relk opened his mouth, jaw working through the sound. "Muuuve."

"There we go," Jun grinned. Six stayed silent, watching.

Jorge said, "We heard that word on Reach too, but it's not just used in battle. We did a lot of moving in forests, trying to avoid places with people in them. He'd use that as a warning."

Six's gaze drifted even farther toward the floor, but she wrenched it back and looked between Jorge and Relk. This was why she hadn't been able to meet Jorge's eyes yet. She'd missed things, hadn't been there for so many alien afternoons, and all she could see now was the video on the screen, tinted so yellow that she couldn't tell what color the light must have really been...

Fred said, "Okay, that's a step. What else can we do?"

Halsey was also shaking her head as she entered the word into the computer. "It is going to take a lot of practice, but this is a good start."

"I just think we should do more."

Jorge hunched. He bowed his head so his shoulder armor almost arced like the side of his helmet. It wasn't a look of shame, either- it was a preparation. "Don't push it. He'll come around."

Six sat up. "He's not pushing it." She realized she was gritting her teeth and reined back, far more comfortable making peace out of the situation than making it worse...although she still hackled. "We haven't been working that long. We can do some more." She shrugged. The idea was to end her snappish statement on a cheerier note, but the shrug ended up brushing off more than the difficulty of the language.

Jorge was not diverted. He was still somewhere in those unnaturally-colored trees. "It took me a lot of patience to figure out what I did. Howabout you, Relk? Do you want to go on?"

They all looked at Relk. Six watched Halsey watch him; the happiness had gone, and her expression was all shrewdness now. The Elite shrugged.

Footsteps sounded across the cavern. The Spartans looked up. Craning her neck around Fred's shoulder, Six could see that Vinh had simply woken up and walked over to Kelly. Halsey reacted a moment later, following their gazes before returning to the center of the circle.

The language lesson progressed quickly after that. Jorge and Halsey grew more adept at explaining to Relk in pidgin Sangheili and a smattering of English what he should be focusing on. Relk learned to cough out the English for left and right. He had picked up the habit of nodding and bobbing his head for yes and no. Fred taught him to say the humans' names, which Relk managed with some struggle. Fred introduced Six to him as Aislinn, which at first she begrudged, but Relk had been having a lot of trouble with the X.

The near-struggle near the medical supplies did not go unnoticed, but when it was finished Vinh turned and stalked toward the group. Any response one of them had been going to make had not counted on the angry glint as she violently sat down with them, stopping her momentum like a plane crashlanding. She was silent except for the slight clunk of her armor as sat down beside them, Relk was still pointing around the cave and trying to convey the Sangheili words for things like 'rock' and 'ceiling', seemingly oblivious to Vinh's attitude.

Six met her eyes for a moment, testing to see whether she would do anything. She didn't know Vinh very well, but the other woman had been quiet to the point of being curt. Her adding to the tension was not on the list of things that Six needed right now.

Vinh kept quiet, though, stewing in thoughts that were unrelated to the ones that made Six angry. Six was almost hyper-aware of how she and Jorge were still touching, their knees occasionally shifting.

It was much easier to use English as the intermediary language rather than Relk's. The alien language required hots, growls, and bubbling noises that the human mouth just couldn't always manage. Relk could produce a rather garbled English if he kept the back of his jaws from opening out too much, but when Six tried the Elite's word for 'weapon' (or 'armed'-they could only be so specific by pointing), it didn't work so well. The word had a yelp at the end; Halsey wrote it down as 'ka-Y'. When Six tried to say it, the yelp came out as something like a coo. Jun laughed so fast that she could hear him trying to catch up and stop it. She couldn't help curving her own expression into a smile and laughed too, and the sound of both of them set off echoes around the cave. Relk opened his mouth and chuffed.

Six thought, This isn't so bad.

Vinh said, "How is this helping?"

The laughter died out. Halsey looked up. "We have discussed this in detail. We need to learn more about these caves and what they contain. Relk can help."

"Are you sure he's helping?"

"He's given us a decent vocabulary."

"But he already ran away from us once. Maybe the crystal is a tracking device, and he's just getting information to bring back to his troops on the surface." Then she seemed to notice Fred looking at her, and lowered her masked gaze." Stiffly she said, "I just think we should be moving on. For all we know, he'll lead his teammates right here. Kelly's ready to go."

"The rest of your teammates are not," Halsey said. Her voice was very flat as she craned her neck to try to meet Vinh's eyes. "I suggest you get your rest too. Even Spartans can have flaws in their judgement without enough rest." She looked down, disinterested with the politicking, ready to resume the language lesson.

Jorge interrupted, sounding angry. "I trust Relk. Who here doesn't? "

There was a challenge there, drawn out and growled. She was pretty sure that the last time she'd heard him like this was an argument with Emile. Here, then, were the lines being drawn in the sand: here was Jorge demanding loyalty, from the others but especially from her. And yet she still didn't quite trust Relk. She hadn't known him as long as Jorge had; she hadn't been in the pictures he'd recorded. Fred, the only other object of his anger, was silent.

"I don't," Vinh said, cutting through the silence with her usual bluntness. "It's part of my job description not to trust them. Yours too, by the way."

"I don't need to be told what my job is. I know what I'm doing and I know where to put my faith." Jorge had gone back to sounding almost good-humored, but the implication stood. Some of us know who belongs. Some of us don't.

Six looked at Vinh to see her reaction. The mask didn't give anything away.

In the end it was Halsey who broke the stalemate. "Trust is irrelevant," she said curtly. "We need to learn. Vocabulary like this is a start, and conversations and simple word games will do the rest, or as much as we can under the circumstances."

Jun said, delighted, "We get to play games?" He was roundly ignored, but some of the tension broke. Six felt it rippling outwards from her shoulders, lifting off from the armor that was as much a second skin as inorganic protection.

"We should, though, move out as soon as the rest of Red Team is rested," Halsey decided. It was the unofficial end of the day's language lesson, and seemed to placate Vinh.

Relk said, "What?" This word was serving him well.

Jun was more patient and obliging to him than Six expected. "Leaving." He gestured toward the nearest tunnel.

Relk chuffed.

Jorge got up, scooping up his helmet from where Halsey had disconnected it from the computer, and headed toward the crates he had brought. Six jobbed a few steps to catch up to him. "How can you be sure?" She asked quietly. "How do you know he's not going to betray us?"

"He had a lot of time to do that while we were out there." He gestured as if to indicate Reach's surface, the Covenant worlds-everywhere except the cave.

"The first time I saw him he was ordering your death," Six said.

"Look at him now."

She looked back at where they had been sitting. Relk was still standing next to Jun and Halsey, working out words. Vinh, predatory and heavy in her mask, looked at Six. The tension was back in both their shoulders, the invisible hackling as they stood there. Jorge wasn't quite glaring, he was too open for such narrow expressions, but it was close. So close. Six had upset him with a single question and yet there were still more to be asked. Why were the words humming uselessly at the back of her throat?

I'm allowed to demand these answers. It is my right.

She said, in a voice too small to be hers, "Would I get it if I'd been with you after the Solace?"

They had reached the crates. He turned to her, cradling his helmet under his arm like she held hers. Mirror images, both of them: exact but opposed. "I'm not so good with words," Jorge said. "But, even if you weren't there...trust me."

She sighed, trying for laughter. It had worked for Jun, but it didn't take any of the small out of her voice. "Is there a certain kind of trust you get from agreeing to try to kill one another occasionally?"

Jorge said, "I suppose there was, but I think we're done with that."

He sounded very serious.

Six sighed again. She couldn't name her unease well enough to talk about it. There was, at least, faith to be found in Jorge if not Relk, but even that felt like unsure footing right now.

"Trust me on this," Jorge said again, drawing his lines. "Alright?"

Six nodded.