Chapter 12: Lumen at the Rooftop Gathering

The signal was not a sound.

Mara noticed it first at half past seven the following morning, when she was still horizontal on the camp bed and Brekke was making his feelings about her continued unconsciousness known through the medium of deliberate claw-shifting on the fold-down chair's metal arm. The sensation was something between a smell she couldn't name and a pressure behind her left eye that was not quite a headache — the way you sometimes sense a storm before any reasonable evidence for one exists. She lay still for a moment with her eyes open in the dark of the alcove and catalogued it: not pain, not fear. A pull. Like the map, but smaller, and located inside her sternum rather than in her coat pocket.

"That," said Brekke.