Three days after the formal Luna designation, something shifts.
Not in the compound. Not in the political structure or the operational framework or the ongoing intelligence picture. In me — in the deep place, in the way the mark runs along my wrist like a tide that has found its proper rhythm.
I notice it first in the morning, before I'm fully awake. The quality of the bond is different — not louder, not stronger in the raw-power sense, but cleaner. Like a radio signal that was always slightly off-frequency, now tuned.
I lie in the dark for a few minutes, mapping it.
Then I get up and go find Damon, because that's what I do now.
***
He's on the balcony.
Not the council's formal balcony — the one off the residential wing that looks east over the compound and, beyond the compound wall
