Chapter 24: The Reunion That Is Not a Resolution

Evander stepped through the door and pulled it mostly shut behind him, because the light from the corridor was a liability and he needed thirty seconds to assess the room and he could not do either of those things while also managing whatever was happening in his chest.

The room was small. A camp bed against the far wall, a folding chair, a single LED strip overhead that buzzed at a frequency just below conscious annoyance. Cael sat on the edge of the bed with a thriller face-down beside him and the particular upright posture of someone who had decided, at some point in the last twenty-four hours, that he was not going to let this make him smaller. He had a bruise coming up along his left cheekbone that no one had mentioned in the thermal imaging, because thermal imaging did not show bruises.

Evander looked at the bruise for approximately one second and then moved his attention to the rest of him. Upright. Breathing. Both hands visible. No significant physical compromise beyond the bruise and the particular tightness around his eyes that came from not sleeping in a strange place.