He arrived at the Thursday meeting at two-oh-three.
Three minutes late, which was unprecedented in forty years of Fenn Calloway attending things. Nobody said anything. The outer territory committee chair — Brynn, who had taken the role with the specific reluctant competence of someone who was better at it than anyone else and had eventually stopped arguing about that — simply noted his arrival and continued.
Nara was at the back.
She'd had a morning ward shift and had come to the Hold for archive work and had not planned to be at the committee meeting. She was there because Cael Orin had appeared in the archive doorway at one-forty-five and said: "The meeting is at two. Fenn's treatment was this morning. I thought you might want to be nearby."
He had then walked away before she could r
