Dawn over Avalon didn't arrive gently. It arrived like an alarm going off inside eight separate chests at once.
The penthouse was hushed. Usually by this hour it was all Stella's morning experiments and the smell of Reika's coffee. This morning the coffee was there, but nobody was talking over it.
I stood on the balcony in the cold before sunrise. The city lay below in scattered sleeping lights, the sky going from black to a bruised violet at the edge. Seventeen months. Yesterday it had been a number on a table in Luminarc. This morning it was weight.
'Just start,' I told myself. 'One breath. One step. Then the next.'
They came out one by one, not summoned, just woken by the same clock. Not in sleep clothes. In the plain grey training gear Alastor had sent down the night before, the fabric still stiff and unfamiliar, a uniform for a war against nothing but our own limits.
