NEVA POV
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The announcement was about a girl.
Not in the way that phrase usually goes. A girl named Pria Vane — seventeen years old, daughter of Garrick Vane, who had stood in our compound and confessed his manipulations and walked out with the specific exhausted gratitude of a man who'd received more mercy than he'd planned for. A girl whose name I'd heard once, in the context of why her father had done everything he'd done, and who I'd made a promise about without knowing her at all.
"She's accelerating," Ziko said, once the second round of coffee had been made and everyone who was going to be in the kitchen was in it. "Faster than Vane expected. He called me this morning — not Ryke, not Mitch, me specifically, which I think he decided was the right call after thinking about it."
