NEVA POV
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Silo used his words on a Wednesday.
I know the day specifically because Ziko announced it at dinner with the solemnity of someone logging a historic moment for the record, which it arguably was. In the time I'd known Silo Brack, I had heard him use words to convey: threats, perimeter updates, tactical assessments, the exact number of times Ziko had been wrong about something (a statistic he maintained with alarming precision), and once — memorably — the sentence *she's already more than I deserve,* which he'd said to a different person about a different situation and which had mattered enormously.
What I had not heard him use words for, until Wednesday: the other kind.
It started at the east wall.
He and Vael had been running the perimeter check together — jointly now, w
