The drain was not dramatic.
That was, Lena thought afterward, the most frightening part of it — that something capable of doing real damage to the field could feel, in its first minutes, almost gentle. A slow cooling at the edges. The warmth still there, still complete, but with a quality of thinning underneath it, like a blanket that was still warm but had begun, almost imperceptibly, to lose its weight.
She felt it through all six connections at once.
Aries — the direction, the axis — felt it as a kind of vertigo, she understood, watching his face: the specific disorientation of someone whose sense of where was beginning to blur at its furthest edges, the field's reach no longer entirely certain of its own boundary.
Cade — the fire, the density — felt it as cold. She saw him go rigid
