The silence lasted about four seconds.
Then Lyra said, very quietly, "What did you just do?"
I was on my knees on the training yard ground without remembering getting there. My hands were pressed flat into the earth and my whole body was shaking — not fear, the specific physical aftermath of something enormous moving through you that wasn't sized for your body. Like lightning had borrowed my bones and given them back slightly scorched.
"I don't know," I said.
Maren was crouching in front of me, both hands on my face, checking something I didn't have the vocabulary to name. Her fog-gray eyes were doing something I hadn't seen before — not alarm exactly. Closer to the expression of a scientist watching an experiment produce results the model hadn't predicted.
"Can you feel them?" she as
