They came up from the chamber at evening.
Six hours below ground, and the grey rain had stopped, and Drennick's sky had gone the specific deep blue of autumn dusk that looked like it had been planned for the occasion and hadn't been.
Sera stood at the top of the stairs and breathed the outside air, the bond reasserting itself properly at surface level — Rowan's thread brightening back to its full frequency, Darius's presence steady at the three-territory distance.
She checked herself the way Kira had taught her to check patients coming through something significant: starting from the feet, working upward, looking for what had changed.
Nothing felt wrong.
Nothing felt different, exactly — or not different in the way she'd feared, the being-changed-without-knowing, the sun-burning quali
