Chapter 14: Owan Callis Enters the First Meditation and Returns Mostly Himself

The grounding anchors were copper-wound and cold, and Owan placed them himself—one at each wrist, one at the base of his throat, following the sequence Vael had drilled into him so thoroughly that his hands moved through the procedure the way hands move through prayers one has recited longer than one has understood them.

The chamber they had requisitioned for the purpose was a secondary archive room off the water-throne's lower diplomatic wing: windowless, climate-controlled to the even temperature that resonance work required, its walls lined with the dense tidal-record cases whose mass, Vael had noted with characteristic practicality, would provide useful electromagnetic buffering. A Nubis administrative coordinator had overseen the furniture removal with the particular expression of someone performing a task they found professionally bewildering but lacked authority to decline. The bare floor was pale stone, cooled by the same deep-aquifer piping that ran beneath the entire palace complex, and it held the cold with the patient permanence of things that have been cold for a very long time.

Vael had arranged the temporal monitors along the room's northern wall, three of them, calibrated to intervals of fifteen minutes each. He had prepared the withdrawal protocol on a single folded card and placed it in his coat's interior pocket, where he had touched it twice while Owan assembled the anchors, both times with his right hand, the hand he used for deliberate gestures rather than unconscious ones.