The question did not fade the way sound fades. It settled, the way sediment settles after a river has been disturbed—slowly, irrevocably, changing the shape of everything it touched.
Every person who had heard it now carried it somewhere behind their ribs, and the room in Archive Three became the kind of silent that no one knew how to break because breaking it would mean acknowledging that the silence was real, that the question was real, that the figure now standing at the bridge's midpoint was waiting for something only one of them could give.
Grace lowered her eyes to the floor.
Kael turned toward Sarya with an expression that held no advice and offered none, only a kind of helpless certainty, as though he had always known it would arrive here and had spent the intervening months trying not to think about it.
