[KAEL — POV]
He could not sleep.
This was unusual in a different way than not sleeping for operational reasons. He had gone through periods of insomnia before—mostly in the centuries when the war had been worst, when the weight of it accumulated past the point his mind could process while awake and so simply refused to switch off. Those had been bad years.
This was not that. This was—specific. He lay in Halset's small room and listened to the city at night and thought about an orange rolling under a bench and a twelve-year-old's resigned certainty that it was gone and the completely unrehearsed quality of her laugh.
He had known a great many people over a great many years. He'd known compelling people, brilliant people, people whose minds worked in ways that impressed him genuinely. He
