The reach Caleb sent into the Halden statue found nothing to hold.
He had braced for the cold gray place, for a tired shape in it he could name and offer a door. He found instead a room with no one in it, an emptiness shaped like a man, the silver under his ribs reaching out and closing on air.
There was no Halden to call. There was no sliver left to choose. The door Rina's tracker had read as flat was flat because there was nothing on the other side of it.
Caleb stood in the dead doctor's office with his hand out toward a thing that could not be reached, and he understood, in his body now and not only in his head, what too far gone meant.
And the statue, feeling him reach, woke up wrong, a sleeper coming up swinging at a touch in the dark.
A given statue with a person inside woke slow, as Pasco had, surfacing toward a voice. This one had no person to surface.
