Kai didn't move for a long time.
Neither did the Source.
That was the thing about it — the waiting had a quality. It wasn't the neutral patience of stone or time or geological process. It was directed. The way a held breath is directed. The way silence in a conversation is directed, when the silence is an invitation rather than an absence.
He had spent enough time with silences to know the difference.
His Null Field held the awareness like a second skin — the Source's attention, distributed across the cavity, present in the amber light and the faint sub-audible resonance that he'd initially attributed to the building materials settling and now was no longer certain about. It pressed against the edges of his field the way a question presses against the inside of a closed mouth.
Waiting.
He thought: What does a ninety-year-old question feel like, from the inside?
He thought: Probably exactly like this.
