Death Sense opened on its own.
I hadn't asked it to. It had done that exactly once before, in the dark above the tide, when something crossed into range that was too big for me to have a say in whether I noticed it, and it did it again now, and I stopped walking so fast that Ilse walked into my back.
"What."
'…'
"Cade."
'Ilse.'
'Ilse, there are five.'
Five lives. Not near. That was the part my head couldn't hold. They were a long way off and they filled me anyway, five enormous slow weights strung out in a line across the floor of the layer, each one bending everything around it the way a stone bends cloth, and Death Sense gave me their distance and their heading and then quietly declined to give me their size, the way it had flinched off the serpent, because there are numbers a sense won't say out loud.
