Sera told Darius about the call at eleven that night, the compound quiet around them, Rowan long asleep.
He listened to all of it — Hale's shift, the elder, the account that might finally explain Marrow. He asked the right questions, the operational ones, and said the right things about caution and patience and letting Drennick move at its own pace.
And then he went quiet in a way that wasn't the thinking quiet, or the attending quiet.
Sera noticed.
"What?" she said.
"Nothing," he said, which in a decade of living with Darius she had learned meant something specific: not nothing, but something he was deciding whether to say.
"Tell me," she said.
He held the window — the river window, the right one — not looking at her. Not performing the looking-away, actually looking at the dark wa
