She looked at him.
There was something in the way he said this that she filed without knowing exactly where to put it. The specific quality of a man who had assessed something and had arrived at his assessment before the conversation and was confirming it rather than discovering it.
She was about to ask what he meant.
Then the light.
It was at the compound's north edge. The section where the old supply structures were. Dark at this hour, the fires not lit, the specific, isolated quiet of a part of the village that nobody used at night.
There was a light there.
Not a fire. The specific, cold, flat light of a spirit stone torch, the kind used for late-night maintenance.
And in the light—
She stopped walking.
He stopped beside her.
The distance was approximately forty meters. Far enough that the details were not precise. Close enough that the light caught what was in it, and the light was catching a woman, and a man.
She knew the man's silhouette.
