The silence that Doctor's two-part reassurance had produced inside the barrier did not last long .
Tula's web-fracture eyes moved across the team — reading the faces the way the eyes always read everything , not only what the surfaces communicated but what the surfaces were working to conceal . Kei's face communicating nothing . The poker face receiving Doctor's instruction and Doctor's reassurance and the five ribcages expanding four meters beyond the barrier's perimeter with the specific flat professional quality of someone whose operational assessment had been running continuously since the instruction arrived and had arrived at a conclusion it was not producing .
