Chapter 4: Seris Explains What She Saw Coming and Could Not Stop

She did not answer immediately.

This was not hesitation in the ordinary human sense — not the pause of someone gathering courage or searching for the right word. It was something more architectural: the careful, deliberate preparation of a being who, when she committed to a sentence, intended it to be load-bearing. Aeron recognised the difference. He had taken such pauses himself, in ages when the thing he was about to say would outlast the person he was saying it to.

He waited. He was very good at waiting. It had, for a long time, been the primary thing he was good at.