The council didn't end with a bang. It ended with the quiet, decided scrape of chairs on stone.
We had a plan. Now came the much harder business of living it. The room emptied around me in purposeful currents. Alastor and Rachel were already bent over a projection of the estate's lower levels, talking in the clipped shorthand of two people who have argued about engineering since she could hold a stylus. Cecilia stepped into a side chamber and started weaving the political cover we'd need, her voice crisp and carrying even through the glass. Seraphina and Reika exchanged a single nod and went off together, two swordswomen with nothing that needed saying.
I stayed where I was.
The next seventeen months were enormous, logistically and every other way. They weren't the heaviest thing on my mind. My eyes went from the people I loved to the empty corridor, and my thoughts went to one person.
'Stella.'
