She woke at five forty-three.
Not from a dream. Not from the lodestone's alarm — it wasn't alarm she felt when she came suddenly and completely awake in the dark. It was something else. Something that did not have alarm in it at all but had — she lay still and felt it carefully, the way she felt the field, reaching into the quality of the thing that had woken her.
Approach.
Not threatening approach. Multiple people, moving slowly, on foot, from the direction of the main road. The field feeling their frequencies as they entered its reach — new ones, unfamiliar, and underneath the unfamiliarity the specific quality she'd felt in Marcus and Petra when they arrived: the quality of people who have been inside a frame and are no longer, who are moving through the space after the leaving with
