Chapter 16: Cass Chooses Someone to Protect

The echoes moved differently when Seraveth stopped watching them.

Cass noticed this the way she noticed most things—through her charge, which had been misbehaving since the megacity and was now doing something stranger still: leaning toward the spectral presences like a compass needle dragged by a lodestone it had no name for. She kept her fists closed. She kept her breathing measured. She watched the shadows at the room's perimeter shift and settle into new configurations with the quiet coordination of creatures that did not need to communicate to act.

Seventeen years of training, and not one lesson about this.