The documents took two hours to read properly.
Fenix knew this because he counted them, sitting on the stone steps outside the main hall with his back against the doorframe and his injured hand resting in his lap, listening to the quality of the silence inside change in increments the way temperature changed — gradually, and then in a way you noticed all at once. The first hour had the silence of concentration, of people moving through information with the disciplined attention of those trained to extract what mattered and discard what did not. The second hour had a different texture entirely. Heavier. The kind of silence that accumulated when the information being processed was reclassifying things that had previously been classified differently, when the mind was not simply receiving new data but revising the architecture that older data had built.
He had been told, again, to stay outside.
