The morning came the way mornings came after nights that had changed things: ordinarily, with light through the windows and the sound of the city resuming its patterns and the particular smell of a space that had been slept in, the specific texture of a day that did not know it was different from the days before it and was going to proceed as if it weren't.
Aiden woke before the others.
This was not unusual. He had always woken early, the particular habit of a mind that began working before the rest of him was ready, that processed the night's accumulation of information in the first minutes of consciousness with the same systematic attention it gave to everything else. He lay still for a moment in the narrow room the house had given him, the ceiling above him ordinary and real, and he did what he always did in the first minutes of being awake: he assessed the baseline.
The baseline had moved.
