Sleep, for Finnian, had always been a scheduled interval for mental defragmentation. In the clean hay of the Aethelburg stable, it was a chaotic plunge into a sea of new sensory data. He dreamed not of numbers and ledgers, but of textures: the rough grain of wood, the cool smoothness of river stone, the impossible softness of a child's laughter. He woke with the dawn, not to an alarm, but to the crowing of a rooster and the low murmur of a city coming awake. For a long moment, he lay still, cataloging the unfamiliar inputs. The ache in his muscles from days of walking was a new data set. The smell of animals and hay was another. He assigned them no value. He merely noted their existence.
His stomach clenched, a blunt, physical demand. In Silverport, a nutrient dispenser would have provided a precisely calibrated solution. Here, the problem of hunger required a different kind of calculus.
