Three things happened in the days that followed the Summit's close, and I would later understand that they were connected, though at the time they felt separate.
The first was small.
I was in the stocked kitchen — which had become the place I went to think, the way some people walked or ran or sat in silence — working through a batch of pepper sauce that would have made the Cajun cook in New Orleans weep with either pride or horrified criticism, when the pack bond pulsed in a way I'd learned to distinguish from background warmth.
Not alarm. Not the flat urgency of threat.
Something more like — attention. A collective focusing, the way a group of people all look up when a sound is wrong.
I set down my spoon and extended the pack awareness the way Gamma Reese had spent the last several
