Silver's POV
Silver's eyes opened to silence.
Not the ordinary silence of a house before dawn, the kind he'd grown so accustomed to over the years that it had become almost a comfort — this was heavier, wrong in a way he couldn't immediately name, pressing down on his chest before his mind had even finished separating sleep from waking.
He lay still for a moment, cataloguing.
No hum from the estate's generators. No distant chatter from the security team stationed along the perimeter, the low, familiar murmur of radios and footsteps that had lulled him to sleep every night for the last fifteen years. No birdsong beyond the window, which struck him as odder than the rest combined — birds didn't simply stop, not all of them, not all at once.
He sat up.
