"Broke him," Lena repeated.
She stopped at the gate. Forty feet of grass and gravel separated her from Halloway, and she felt the field around her — warm, complete, the same warmth it offered everyone — reaching toward him across that distance and finding, where it should have found purchase, nothing.
Not resistance, exactly. Resistance would have been a kind of contact.
This was absence. The field reached him and found no surface to be warm against.
"Forty years he ran that network," Halloway said. His voice was unhurried, conversational, the voice of a man discussing the weather. "Forty years of careful, patient, controlled power. The thing he built after he decided my way was too crude for him." He looked at the house behind her. "And in eleven days, you took it apart. Gave away the
