Gerald had a particular silence.
I had grown up inside it. I knew its textures and its temperatures the way you know the weather patterns of a place you have lived your whole life. There was the silence before he made a decision. The silence after he had already made one. The silence that meant he was calculating what you knew and what you did not and how to arrange the gap between those two things to his advantage.
This was none of those silences.
This was the silence of a man who had arrived somewhere expecting a particular landscape and found something entirely different, and was doing the very fast internal work of recalibrating without letting the recalibration show on his face.
He was not entirely successful.
Old Alpha Leon beside him was doing his own version of the same calcul
