"There's another way."
Vane's head turned. "Talk."
"Old-school Guide technique. Full sensory sync." Owen's voice had the careful cadence of a man defusing his own sentence as he spoke it. "You strip out all external interference. Sealed room, no light, no sound. Then you synchronize each sense one at a time. Touch, hearing, smell, sight, taste. When it locks in, the bond recalibrates at a deep layer. Stability can jump significantly in one session."
My pulse picked up. "Sounds perfect. What's the catch."
Owen's expression did something complicated. He looked at Diana. Diana looked at him. The air between them solidified into the most eloquent silence I'd witnessed between two people who weren't us.
"The sync requires zero barriers between skin surfaces," Owen said. "Clothing fibers in
