MITCH POV
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Mitch noticed the pattern before he understood what the pattern meant.
Duke's rotation past the archive room had increased. Not dramatically — Duke didn't do anything dramatically, that was the whole architecture of him — but measurably, in the way Mitch measured most things, which was constantly and without announcing it. Three passes a day had become five. Five had become seven. The sketchbook came out at the archive room doorway more often than its geometry justified.
Mitch said nothing about this.
He had learned, across the months since Neva's arrival, that some patterns were his to notice and not his to narrate. Ziko narrated everything. Mitch preferred to hold the information and let it resolve on its own timeline.
He was, in this specific respect, currently being
