The leviathan lifted at midmorning and the compound was gone into the cloud cover within four minutes. Vane watched it go from the upper deck until the cloud closed over it completely and then looked at the ocean ahead.
The crossing home took ten days.
It was not the same crossing as the outward journey. The outward journey had been the specific tension of five people establishing a dynamic that did not yet exist. The return was those same five people with twelve weeks of compound behind them, which produced a different quality of shared space — not warmer, not more expressive, but settled in the way that things settled when they had been tested and held.
