The commotion reached him before he was fully awake.
His ears found it first — the particular pitch of voices below that the sleeping mind classified as background and the waking mind classified as something worth attending to. Not the ordinary noise of the building's morning, not Minato's continuous street sound coming through the window. Something sharper. Women's voices, multiple, the specific quality of sound that fear and grief produced when they arrived together.
Nathan was already sitting up.
He took Kyōmei from the floor beside the mat and stepped into the corridor.
