Arwen's POV
I don't sit down. Standing feels necessary right now, like the conversation requires me to be ready to move in any direction without warning.
Ashcroft, Mira Vance, doesn't push me to sit. She moves to the desk at the front of the room and leans against it with the careful posture of someone making themselves less threatening on purpose, and she looks at me with that new expression, the one that replaced the careful observer stillness with something closer to honesty.
"Tell me what you know about The Hunger," she says.
"Tell me why you're asking," I say.
"Because the version you know is probably incomplete and the gaps matter for what I need to explain." She pauses. "I'm not testing you. I'm trying to find out where to start."
I give her the outline. The entity beneath the
