DUKE POV
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Reine came back the following morning with the look of someone who had been through something enormous and was still deciding what to do with the shape it had left.
Duke was at the compound gate when she arrived — not waiting for her specifically, he'd been checking the east wall for Silo, who'd mentioned a loose board in the perimeter fence — but there when she walked in, the way he was often simply there when the important moments arrived, which he'd long since stopped questioning as coincidence.
She looked at him.
He looked at her.
She'd been with her father all night. He could read it in the particular quality of her tiredness — not the tiredness of someone who'd lost sleep, the tiredness of someone who'd been doing the most demanding kind of being-present for a sust
