She was watching him read the room.
"Well," she said. Her voice was very quiet. The quiet of exhaustion and also of the specific thing that was in it alongside the exhaustion.
"Well," he said.
He sat beside her.
He looked at the child.
Lyra shifted slightly so he could see better.
The child was looking at nothing in particular with the unfocused attention of something very new. The ambient temporal awareness was present — not visible, but felt, the specific quality of a presence that was simultaneously in this moment and in a larger sense of the moment, the way someone with perfect pitch existed in sound differently from someone without it.
'That's going to be interesting,' he thought.
'Seventeen years of interesting, at minimum.'
He looked at Lyra.
"The name," he said.
"Say it," she said.
He said it.
The child's attention shifted.
