The sixth interval arrived at dawn, and Vael used words.
They had established the arrangement over five intervals — Fedora and Sera at six feet, Helena's notation surface, Raze at the communicative edge, Darius reading the ground and Garrett reading everything else. It had acquired the character of a procedure through repetition, and Raze had been aware for two days that the procedure was becoming a comfort and that comforts of that kind produced exactly the sort of unexamined assumption that had cost both him and Asura something in the dark six hours earlier.
So he changed one thing.
'I'm going to tell her about the deadline,' he said, before the interval opened.
Helena's stylus stopped. Fedora's attention shifted toward him with the specific focus of someone recalculating.
'She has been inside for four hundred years,' Fedora said. 'We do not know what she can carry.'
