They came home from Lagos with one fewer name than they should have had, and the kneeling statue in the garage lifted its head when Caleb walked in, the first time it had moved in days.
He stopped in the doorway. The team filed past him into the house, tired, quiet, carrying the Lagos loss as grief is carried, a thing with no weight that pulls at you anyway.
Caleb stood and watched the kneeling piece watch him, its no-face turned up to him with the patience it always had, and he felt the thing under his ribs lean toward it, kin to kin.
"You felt it," Caleb said to the statue, low, where the others wouldn't hear. "Didn't you. The small one. You felt it work on the builder. You know there's another one of us out there now, one that doesn't ask."
The statue did not answer, because it could not, but its head stayed lifted, and Caleb understood that something had changed in the house's strange tenant since the tower. "You don't like it either. Good. Neither do I."
