Chapter 5: Flight Into the Ashfield

They had three days, Maren had said. She meant they had tonight.

Cael understood this the way he understood the production manifests — not from the words themselves but from the shape of the silence around them. Three days was the official architecture of grief: the formal condolences, the arranged meals, the House Vorn escorts standing at corridors with their carefully neutral faces. Tonight was the actual situation. He had watched his mother move through the family quarters for exactly forty minutes after their return from the courtyard, touching nothing, opening nothing, and he had understood that she was not being still. She was conducting an inventory.

"The communications console," she said finally, standing in the center of the main room. Not to him specifically. To herself, or to the problem.