Peace, when it finally held, did not announce itself.
It arrived in the gradual thinning of wartime residue: fewer urgent runners in the corridors, fewer maps left open on the study table overnight, fewer moments when a sound from the grounds pulled both of us into automatic readiness before the mind could name the noise as ordinary. The Alpha house exhaled by degrees. The territory, scarred along its eastern depth and permanently altered in the ranking relationships that had gambled on Darien’s elegant future, began the slower labor of living inside the aftermath rather than bracing against the next blow.
I learned the texture of that labor in the first true weeks after the formal residual stand-down.
Reconstruction schedules replaced forward logistics. Settlement ledgers replaced casu
