She was awake by early afternoon.
The oldest intermediary — the accumulated one — had still not fully recovered, his gift cycling in and out with the unsteady rhythm of something trying to find its baseline after significant disruption. The youngest, pale-eyes, was awake but silent, sitting against the wall with the particular inward focus of someone working through something privately that they were not ready to surface.
Cira sat in the center of the holding room like someone who had decided that the wall was beneath her and the floor was available. Upright. Still. Watching the door with an expression that had shed the collected professional temperature of the courtyard and was now something rawer. Not vulnerable — Cira did not seem to do vulnerable. Something more like honest.
She loo
