She had expected not to sleep well.
She had not expected to stop sleeping altogether after three in the morning.
The bond was partly responsible. It had grown louder since his second visit—not more urgent, but more precise, as if proximity had taught it a language it had previously lacked. Before the first night he came to the kitchen, it had oriented itself in a general direction: northwest, upper floors, the part of the compound she did not enter. Now it carried a specificity she could only describe, in the careful clinical language she reserved for things she refused to dramatize, as particular knowledge.
It knew the difference between Caelum moving through the administrative wing and Caelum standing still.
She resented having that information.
She wrote it down anyway, because res
