The seventh day came the way the seventh day always comes — exactly like the ones before it, the morning arriving without announcement, the light through the window the same light it always was, the compound sounds the same compound sounds. The world did not dress itself differently for significance. It just continued.
I was awake before the light.
I lay in the dark and I ran through everything — not from anxiety, not the cycling disaster rehearsal that anxiety produces. More like a musician running scales before a performance. The mechanics of what I would need to do. The center I would need to hold. The amplification chain I had practiced twelve times and could now sustain for forty minutes without the fatigue breaking the channel. The suppression interior that Maren had spent seven da
