She could not sleep.
She had known she would not be able to sleep. She had gone to bed at ten with the green notebook and the focus stone and the pack law volume she had been working through all afternoon, telling herself that reading would settle her the way it usually settled her, the specific comfort of information moving through a mind that needed something to do with itself.
She had read four pages.
The same four pages three times.
The words had moved through her eyes and not reached her in any meaningful way and after the third pass she had closed the volume and set it on the desk and lay in the dark and looked at the ceiling and listened to the mountain wind in the pine trees and thought about tomorrow.
Tomorrow was everywhere.
It was in the specific quality of the pack house
