Location:Seven Peaks — Command Center
Date/Time:TC1854.12.24 (Late Evening)
The command center was empty except for Raven and 7T9.
Not by accident. Raven had sent the evening staff to Midwinter preparations — the festival began tomorrow, and the command center's skeleton crew could be spared for lantern-stringing and kitchen support without compromising operational coverage. The formation displays ran themselves. The scanner ran itself. The intelligence feeds would alert her if anything changed.
She sat at the map table. The eastern display glowing. The crescent. The dots. The organic growth perimeter. The same picture she'd been looking at for weeks, familiar now in the way that terrible things became familiar when you looked at them long enough — not less terrible, just less surprising.
