Location:Seven Peaks — The Hall; The North Camp; The East Barracks
Date/Time:TC1857.07.11 – TC1857.07.19
A mountain smells different when three governments leave it, and what Raven noticed on the second morning after was that she could smell her own settlement again.
For six days it had been other people's cooking. Confederacy mutton and whatever the Empire had brought that had cinnamon in it and the Federation's field rations, which smelled of nothing at all and somehow smelled of nothing at all very strongly. It had gone in half a day, all of it, and underneath was bread and coal and wet stone and the sourness that comes off a great many people washing in cold water, and she stood at the top of the east stair and breathed it and found that she had been holding something for a week without noticing.
Then she went down and started work, because the first return was due inside a fortnight and nobody at Seven Peaks had ever done one.
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