Riven noticed the shift the way he noticed most things, before anyone had announced it and before the people inside it fully understood what had happened.
He came onto the executive floor on a Tuesday afternoon, three days into the new atmosphere, and he knew within thirty seconds. It was not in anything either of them said or did. It was in the texture of the floor itself, the specific quality of two people who had been moving toward each other and had stopped, the particular energy of restraint that lived in spaces where something was being deliberately held back.
He sat in the small meeting room with Colt for twenty minutes and handled the operational matter he had come for and watched the floor through the glass panel the whole time. Ava at her desk, focused and contained and doing e
