Austin's location
....
The room was quiet.
Austin had always preferred quiet. Not as a philosophical position — he found philosophical positions about personal preferences to be a waste of language — but as a practical one. Noise was a symptom of minds that required external stimulation to function. The silence of a stripped room was simply the silence of a space that had been made efficient, and efficiency was the only standard Austin had ever consistently applied to anything, including himself.
A fire in the grate. A chair. A window. The circle drawn in the next room, three days' work reduced to geometry on cold stone.
He sat with his tea and looked at the morning.
Grey sky. Fog over the fields. A road through the treeline, empty and still.
He thought about Isabella.
