Nobody slept the night before we left.
I knew this not because anyone said so, but because the compound had a particular quality at two in the morning — a held-breath stillness that was different from the stillness of genuine sleep. Sleep has a warmth to it, a settling. What I felt moving through the walls and corridors of Blackthorn territory that night was the stillness of people who were lying down with their eyes open, running through things.
I sat at the eastern creek in the dark and ran through mine.
Not tactics — Caden had run tactics until there was nothing left to run. Not fear — I had made my arrangement with fear weeks ago, the one where it got to exist but not to steer. What I ran through was simpler and harder than either of those things. I thought about every person who wa
