Thirty minutes passed.
Zeph became intimately familiar with what thirty minutes felt like when it was happening in the wrong kind of place.
Each minute had its own texture—not the texture of time moving too slowly, which was a complaint available to people in situations that permitted complaints, but the texture of time moving at exactly the right speed toward something that nobody in the corridor wanted to arrive.
Each minute was present and deliberate and fully occupied. He lived through all of them.
The corridor was four meters wide and twenty meters long and contained seven people and the accumulated weight of everything they had survived to get here, and it had the specific acoustic quality of a space that was listening.
