The morning brought three things.
The first was Sable's message, which arrived at six forty-seven. She was awake — she'd been awake since six, the lodestone running its morning assessment with the new sensitivity of the post-fourth-phase field, feeling the valley in ways she hadn't felt it before. The town's ambient quality. The specific frequencies of its people. She was learning, she realised, to read the field the way she'd learned to read the house — in textures, in qualities, in the specific shapes of things she didn't have names for yet.
Sable's message read:
The three have consolidated. They're asking specific questions now — not internal. They're looking for a channel out. One of them has been inside fourteen years. She's afraid but she's asking.
She read it.
She read: fourtee
