I still hadn't asked a single question.
There were several. They had been building since the barrier appeared around me — since the bond pointed in two directions at once, since I looked across the width of the ruined church and saw the same face twice. Several questions, accumulating with the patient urgency of things that were going to need answers regardless of whether now was a good moment for them.
I hadn't asked any of them.
I was still working out where to start.
Then the world outside detonated.
The sound arrived first — not through the air, through the stone. Through the floor under my feet and the walls on either side and the vaulted ceiling above, a deep percussive shudder that moved through the entire building the way sound moved through bone. Not an explosion heard. An explosion felt, in the chest, in the back teeth, in the place behind the eyes where the Arcane Matrix lived and was still ringing from Austin's earlier work.
Then the shockwave hit.
