She woke at six with the field alive around her.
Not differently than the previous morning in the technical sense — the geography was the same, the valley reach, the house at its centre. But the quality had changed overnight in the way that Jax's connection had changed everything else: not the surface but the inhabiting of it. The field was present now the way people were present in a room. Not background. Not ambient. There.
She lay in the dark and felt it.
She felt the town.
Not the specifics — not individual people, not thoughts or feelings, nothing intrusive. The field didn't work that way, wasn't a surveillance mechanism, wasn't a monitoring system. What she felt was the quality of the place. The ambient frequency of Harrowfield inside the field's alive warmth.
And something was
