The pain was different this time.
Not the ligament — I knew that quality now, the sharp referred thing that arrived with movement and resolved with rest. This was lower. Deeper. The specific quality of something that was not a wrong movement and was not going away on its own.
It arrived at an odd hour.
Darius felt it through the bond before I said anything — the transmission running faster than my conscious acknowledgment of it, his awareness snapping toward me with the immediate total focus I had felt before in the training ring.
He was beside me in under two minutes.
He looked at my face.
"How bad?" he said.
"Different from the ligament," I said. "I don't know what it is."
He looked at the bond's register — the quality of what I was feeling, the specific texture of it.
"Kira," h
