She went to sleep at two.
She knew this was technically insufficient given the previous night's four forty-three arrival and the working's demands on her attention, but her body had apparently decided that two was the available number and she should be grateful for it. She lay in her dark room with the lodestone running its quiet mapping — eight people now, nine with Odessa, the house fuller than it had been since her childhood when it used to fill up at Christmas with relatives and noise and the specific warmth of too many people in too small a space — and she let the counting be restful.
Eight people.
The six-point configuration.
Marcus, tentative in his room, the made-small quality in his shoulders beginning its slow release.
Petra, whose door had been closed since evening, whose f
