Chapter 22: Mira Tells Elian Half the Truth

The neutral hub smelled, as always, of nothing.

Mira had decided this was the most honest thing about it. Every other element of the Arena performed a reality—the shifting walls, the constant temperature, the light that came from everywhere and cast no shadows—but the absence of smell was simply true. There was nothing here. The hub was a held breath between disasters, and it did not pretend otherwise.

She sat on the floor near the third passage for eleven minutes after the terrain shift, letting the residual charge from Thyraen's Reach work its way out of her nervous system. Cass's warmth had reached her differently than it had reached the others—she'd felt that much—landing not at her sternum but at the base of her skull, where the constant incoming signal of other people's emotional states lived like a bruise. It had quieted for approximately forty seconds. She had counted them.