Hour forty.
The wave timer said forty-one minutes to wave thirteen. Vane was on the north battlement running the post-wave count when Isole said it from the central chamber below.
"Something is moving through the sector."
He stayed where he was. "Construct?"
"No." A pause. "It has no life signature. No death anchor. I cannot place Samsara on it at all — there is nothing for either current to hold." Another pause, shorter. "It just has weight."
He went still.
He had read the parchment enough times that specific phrases had lodged in him the way significant things do, in the place below conscious recall. Do not use your diagnostic eyes on it. Nyx had known exactly what she was telling him to not do, and the specificity of it had told him something about what the thing was. An Authority user, she would have said Authority. A mage, she would have said mana signature. She had said neither. She had said it.
