SERA
“You are on in four minutes.”
The event coordinator said it with the focused efficiency of someone managing too many things simultaneously and had reduced all of them to essential units of time. Four minutes left no space for the kind of preparation that was actually sophisticated avoidance.
Sera was standing in the corridor outside the main hall with the folder in her hand and the interior quality of someone who had arrived at a moment they had been building toward and was now standing inside it without anywhere else to be.
She could hear the room through the doors. Six hundred people. The specific acoustic quality of that many people occupying a space, the collective breath and movement and contained anticipation of an audience that had come with genuine purpose.
Professor Mens
