Chapter 363: What the Ground Decided
Nobody slept past midnight. By the ninth hour of the window, both fires had quietly merged into one watch instead of two. Nobody had proposed it out loud. It had simply happened, the way the night watches had merged eight days before.
Soren kept his instrument open on his knees the whole time, the case unclosed for the first time in twelve days. "I'm not putting it away again until this is finished," he said, when Pell asked. "I don't trust myself to get it open fast enough if I do."
"Same," Pell said, and didn't elaborate.
Mira held the shell with both hands now, not one. It had stopped glowing steady sometime after midnight and started pulsing instead — slow, even, like something breathing on purpose for the first time.
"It's matching something," she said. "I don't know what yet."
