"Fifty-eight minutes," she said.
Satou was already moving toward the mechanism.
He stopped after two steps.
Something in the ambient temporal field had changed in the moment the dimensional pocket sealed.
Not the mechanism. Not the working. Something smaller and closer — the specific resonance of temporal energy without a host, the signature of a power that had just been stripped from its owner and was dispersing into the ambient field, the temporal substrate absorbing back what it had once given to a being who no longer had the connection to hold it.
Chronus's power, stripped and then sealed, was bleeding into the environment.
Satou stood still and felt it.
The residue of Richard was in that dispersing power. He could feel it — the specific signature he had carried since the dream realm fight, the thirty percent that had become part of him when he consumed what Merc Assault had left behind. The echo of that signature in the dispersing temporal energy was faint.
But present.
