They left before the sun fully cleared the eastern ridge.
Aria was ready before anyone else. She'd been awake since the coordinates — since she'd lain in her room in the dark with the folded paper against her chest and her mother's handwriting behind her eyes and the burn in her chest doing something that wasn't quite sleep and wasn't quite waking, just a continuous low hum of almost, almost, almost that kept her from stillness until the sky outside her window began its grey transition toward morning.
She was dressed and packed and standing in the courtyard when Kael emerged from the residence, and the look he gave her when he saw her there — already present, already forward-facing, the particular set of her shoulders that he'd learned meant she'd processed something large in the night a
