Dravan came down the staircase with the bearing of a man who had taken a space and made it his and had been its uncontested owner long enough that the ownership had become invisible to him — not performed anymore, just baseline. He was the kind of man whose confidence had never been tested by anything it couldn't redirect, the kind that came from decades of having the right people in the right positions and knowing it.
He saw Halveth first.
"You're back," he said.
Not a greeting. A fact delivered with the particular flatness of someone for whom the fact was mildly inconvenient. He came down the last few stairs and looked at Halveth the way you look at furniture that keeps appearing in the wrong room — the compression, brief, habitual, the expression of a man who saw his former friend's son and saw, every time, the thing he'd done to get here and resented Halveth for making him see it.
