She woke before dawn, which was not unusual.
What was unusual was lying still afterward, doing nothing for approximately twenty minutes, which was unusual enough that Darius woke too — the bond registering her wakefulness the way it always did — and propped himself up to look at her in the dark.
"You're not getting up," he said.
"I'm thinking," she said.
"You usually think while moving."
"I'm thinking about not moving," she said. "Specifically. What it feels like. The room I found." She held the dark ceiling. "When I'm moving, I use the gift actively — the attunement, the Read, finding what I need. And when I'm still, there's just — the ambient version. The thing that's always running underneath, the baseline. And that's what changed, I think. Not the active part. The baseline."
He l
