Ryke turned.
Neva was still there, exactly where she'd been, watching Holt with the particular expression he'd learned to recognize as her system running — let it land, don't perform, ask the next question. Her hands were loose at her sides. Her chin was level.
She was not performing calm. She was simply calm, in the specific way of someone who had spent a week absorbing revelations that should have broken her and hadn't, and was simply deciding what to do with one more.
Something in Ryke's chest did the thing it had been doing more and more since she'd arrived — the settling, the orienting, the compass finding its point.
"The compound kitchen," Neva said, to Holt. Not an invitation. A direction. "It's warmer."
Holt looked at her.
"You must be Neva," he said, with the kind of precise
