The snow had buried the small rural town overnight, piling itself against fences and porches and the bases of streetlights until the familiar geography of the place had been replaced by something softer and less defined. In the hour before dawn the air carried a cold that was not merely uncomfortable but genuinely hostile, the kind that reached past clothing and bit at the skin beneath, that tightened the chest and made each breath feel like a small act of determination. The streetlights threw their sickly yellow pools across the untouched powder in neat, isolated circles, and beyond those circles the darkness was absolute, the kind of rural dark that city people never quite believed in until they stood in it.
Shane was five years old, and he was dragging his little red sled through the frozen crust with both hands wrapped around the pull rope, his small boots punching through the top layer with each step and leaving a trail of lonely, deliberate prints behind him. The sled carried his most important things — a battered wooden soldier worn smooth at the edges from handling, a chipped plastic robot that had lost its right arm somewhere in the course of previous adventures, and a collection of smooth river stones that he had gathered and kept because they were the right weight and the right feel and they were his. The crust made each step louder than it should have been in the pre-dawn quiet, a crunching rhythm that announced his progress to no one.
His grandmother was just pulling out of the drive when her headlights swept across him. She stopped the car immediately, the engine idling with a low rumble that barely disturbed the silence of the street. For a moment she sat there, the shape of her visible through the glass, and then she got out — bundled in her thick coat, her worn carpet bag still clutched in one hand, the focused expression of a woman who had a long day of work ahead of her softening as she took in the full picture of what she was seeing. She crunched across the snow toward him, reached down, and lifted him up, sled and all, with the particular efficiency of someone who has been dealing with small determined humans for long enough to know how to do it without argument.
Inside the warmth of the small house, the tension that a child alone in pre-dawn darkness produces broke into something manageable. Shane's parents were already up, already moving through the early stages of their own day, and they gathered with his grandmother around the kitchen table in the way families did when something needed to be addressed — not angrily, but with the attention the situation required.
His mother looked at him across the table, her voice carrying the specific texture of worry that had relief underneath it. "Shane, where on earth were you going at this hour?"
Shane pulled his mittens off and looked at the scattered toys he'd ridden in with, still on the sled, the wooden soldier lying on its side. "To David's," he said. "And we were going to take his mini bike and run away."
His father exchanged a look with his grandmother over Shane's head — one of those adult exchanges that contain an entire conversation in the space of a second. "Shane, that's dangerous. You could have gotten hurt. Why would you want to run away?"
Shane looked down at the oilcloth surface of the table, at the toys laid out on it. The honest answer was harder to assemble than he had words for yet. "Because I don't belong," he said.
He was adopted. His parents were kind people and hardworking and they provided well for him in every material sense and in most emotional ones. But the disconnection was real regardless, a note played in the wrong key — present, technically correct, but not quite in tune with the music around it. He could not have articulated what produced it. Perhaps it was the clean, measured quality of his adopted family's demeanor sitting at odds with some older, rougher pull he felt operating somewhere below the level of conscious thought. Whatever the source, the feeling was constant: that he had been placed somewhere he was close to belonging but had not quite arrived.
David understood. That was the essential fact of their friendship, and it was enough.
David lived a few blocks over, in a house where the hardship was not subtle or metaphorical. He was Native American, and the shadow of accumulated difficulty had settled so thoroughly over his small frame that it had become part of his silhouette. His mother was paralyzed. The men who cycled through the house were not good men. He carried weight that most adults would have staggered under, and he carried it at the age where most children were still deciding which toys mattered most. That David dreamed of flight made perfect sense. That Shane felt the same urge despite having, by any external measure, less visible cause for it — that was something he had stopped trying to explain. The pull was real regardless of whether the reasons were legible.
Years accumulated the way they did in small towns — marked not by any dramatic events but by the smell of machine oil and honest sweat and the particular way seasons changed in a place where you could actually see the landscape shift. Shane bought his first motocross bike when he was ten, using money he had saved from hauling feed and mending fences on a local farm, and the bike became the physical expression of everything the sled had been reaching toward. He and David rode everywhere together, two silhouettes against the dusk at the edge of town and beyond it, covering ground that felt like freedom because it was ground they chose. David had built his own bike one component at a time, trading salvaged parts and repaired junk until he had a working machine through the sheer force of his ability to patch things together from ruin. The town's adults had largely decided that David was a lost cause, the kind of determination that communities make about difficult children when they have run out of patience. Shane had watched that assessment settle over his friend and had never found it convincing enough to take seriously.
As high school ran toward its end, the paths diverged with the particular sharpness that comes when people who have been moving together arrive at a fork that cannot be negotiated or postponed. David, already sinking into the early stages of heavy drinking, dropped out. Shane, drawn by something he would have described at the time as duty and would later understand as a version of the same instinct that had dragged the sled through pre-dawn snow toward an elsewhere where things fit differently, enlisted.
He spent his senior year preparing for it in the way that someone prepares when they have made a real decision rather than a theoretical one — push-ups until his arms gave out, runs along frost-covered paths in the early dark, the deliberate building of the physical and mental discipline that he understood, from the stories he'd absorbed across his life, to be the foundation of the kind of strength that actually mattered. The Viking and the Native American, as he sometimes thought of them in the private shorthand of his own mind, would no longer share the same horizon.
The military gave him four years of structure, which was what he had been looking for without knowing that was the name for it. He met Karen at his first duty station — bright, immediate, magnetic in the way of someone who understood how to demand and hold attention. They married quickly, with the compressed urgency of people in circumstances that did not favor patience. By the time his mandatory enlistment ended they had two children, and Karen had fought consistently and hard for him to leave the service. Shane, if he was honest with himself, would have chosen to stay. He left anyway, because that was the compromise he had made, and he was a man who honored what he had agreed to.
Civilian life landed on him like something physical. The structure he had built himself around was simply gone — replaced by a dizzying and constantly reconfiguring set of responsibilities that had no clear hierarchy, no unit coherence, no sense that the people around him had been selected and prepared for the same mission. He adapted because he knew how to adapt. But the absence of that structure left a shape in him that he spent years learning to work around.
The late autumn woods, at least, were constant.
"Hey Duke! Here Duke!" Shane's voice cut through the brittle night, carrying easily in the cold air and then dying at the tree line. He swept his high-powered head-mounted flashlight in a wide arc across the dark trees and watched the beam pick out trunks and branches and the irregular texture of undergrowth, reading the shadows for movement. A flicker to his right caught the beam and held it for a moment — a startled doe, frozen in the classic paralysis of a prey animal caught by light, her eyes reflecting it back at him like twin moons suspended at mid-height in the dark.
He was about to call again when the sound came from the other direction — a deep, resonant bark that had Duke's particular quality to it, unmistakable, a few hundred yards off through the timber. Shane smiled and switched the flashlight off. He moved toward the sound by instinct and by the intimate knowledge of this specific terrain that came from years of moving through it, letting the darkness settle around him, navigating by the feel of the ground underfoot and the sound of Duke's baying growing steadily more distinct.
He found him beneath a massive old oak that he knew by its shape against the sky before he was close enough to see its bark. The Redbone Coonhound had a boar coon treed well up in the branches — an old one, from the size of the racket he was making about it. Duke's whole body was committed to the announcement, legs braced, head thrown back, the sound pouring out of him with the unstinting conviction of a dog who has done exactly what he was bred to do and wants everyone in a two-mile radius to know it.
Shane had trained Duke from a pup, building their working relationship through the same patient investment he brought to anything that needed to develop over time rather than be acquired all at once. They were an efficient team — not merely because the dog was good, which he was, but because they understood each other's rhythms in the specific way of a long partnership. Tonight's labor had been genuinely productive. Twenty-six prime coon hides hung on a rope across Shane's shoulder, their weight substantial and satisfying — pelts worth thirty to forty dollars apiece depending on size and condition, which added up to real money for a young man recently out of the service and still building the financial footing that civilian life required. He had left his other dogs at home. Tonight's work had called for focus rather than numbers.
"Good boy." He reached up to pat Duke's broad head, fingers finding the familiar geography of the dog's skull, and felt the tail begin its acknowledgment. He clipped the leash on and turned toward where he'd left the truck.
The weight of the pelts shifted against his shoulder as he changed direction, and that was when he heard the howls.
They were not the sound a coyote pack made when it had caught a scent and was working itself toward a kill — that was a looser, more scattered sound, excited in a way that was almost celebratory. These howls were tight and directional, carrying a specific quality of tension that raised the hair on his forearms before his conscious mind had finished identifying what he was hearing. They were coming from the direction of the last carcass he'd left behind. He had made that calculation deliberately tonight — too many pelts to reasonably carry the carcasses as well, and the local predators would make use of what was left behind. It was a clean and logical arrangement that had worked many times before.
But these were not coyotes.
Coydogs. The hybrid strain that had been working its way through the local population for a few years, part coyote and part stray domestic, with the worst relevant qualities of each parent. They had shed the natural wariness that kept true coyotes at a useful distance from humans, and what replaced it was something more unpredictable and more immediately dangerous. There had been attacks. The blood scent from the pelts on his shoulder was not going to simplify the situation.
He kept the flashlight beam high — angled upward enough to project presence without flooding the ground at his feet — and he began to talk. It was a low, continuous monologue directed at Duke but carried deliberately into the surrounding timber, his voice steady and even and unhurried, a human sound moving through the dark that carried a clear signal beneath its words.
"I left you more than I kept," he said quietly, reasoning aloud toward the darkness in a way that was more for his own composure than for any audience he expected to respond. "The carcasses are back there. That's yours. This is mine." He kept moving at the same deliberate pace, Duke walking close at his leg, the leash held easy but ready.
The hair on his arms stood up before he consciously registered why.
He felt them before the flashlight found them, or before Duke's warning — a low, barely-audible growl that had nothing of Duke's enthusiastic hunting voice in it, something older and more instinctive than that. They were flanking. He could feel the geometry of it in the way the sounds had positioned themselves and then gone quiet — front, both sides, and behind. The classic surround of something that hunts by coordinating pressure.
Shane's voice did not change. The pace of the monologue did not accelerate. He kept the flashlight moving in its slow arc and kept his free hand loose near Duke's head and kept talking in the same level, continuous tone, communicating through sheer consistency that he was not prey, not panicked, not a thing that was going to make any of this easier for anything thinking about closing the distance.
Then the atmosphere changed.
It was not a physical event. Nothing moved that he could point to. But the quality of the air in the clearing shifted with the sudden and total completeness of a pressure change — heavy and undeniable, as if something had entered the space that was not participating in any of the ordinary rules governing what occupied it. Duke's low growl cut off mid-note and collapsed into a submissive whine, the dog pressing close against Shane's leg with his head lowered, his tail tucked, behaving like an animal in the presence of something so far above the predator scale he knew that the predator categories stopped applying.
The coydogs were gone. Not retreating noisily, not breaking and running in the way of animals that have decided a situation is not worth the risk. Gone — absorbed back into the undergrowth with a silence that was itself strange, as if they had been present and then had simply stopped being present, the way a thought disappears when something more urgent arrives.
Shane stood in the middle of the clearing and breathed. The cloud of his exhaled breath rose and vanished in the dark air. "Who is there?" he asked the empty space around him.
Nothing answered in any register his ears could process. But the presence was not in doubt — a distinct awareness, settling over the clearing with a quality that he did not have the vocabulary to name precisely but that he registered with the same certainty with which he registered heat and cold. It was feminine, if that word applied to something operating at this scale. It was not hostile. It was attentive in the way that attention feels when it is being paid to you fully, without reservation or distraction.
Far away, in a realm that did not share a border with anything Shane had walked or driven through or looked at from a rooftop, an entity smiled faintly at the quality of his question — not afraid, not lost, simply direct. The communication she sent was not language, not sound, not anything that traveled through the physical channels his nervous system used to receive information. It arrived as something more fundamental than any of those things. Continue on your path. It won't be easy. But the world will need you.
Shane stood still for a moment longer, reading the cleared air around him. Then he shook his head slightly and chalked what remained of the feeling up to adrenaline — to the particular heightened state that a genuine threat followed by its sudden absence produced in the body, to the long night and the cold and the way darkness played with the edges of perception when a man had been alone in it for hours. He was good at accounting for the irrational in rational terms. He had been doing it his whole life.
He led Duke to the truck, the heavy pelts thudding against his leg with every step, the dog staying close at his heel all the way to the cab door.
The lights were on when he got home. That told him something before he reached the front door. Karen was at the kitchen table, awake at a time that wasn't wakefulness for any normal purpose — she had the look of a woman who had spent hours in motion and had recently stopped, sitting with the specific exhausted tension of someone who has been rehearsing a conversation while pacing and is now ready to have it.
Shane read the room in the moment it took to step through the door, set the pelts down, and register her expression. He had known for months that this conversation was coming. He had known the shape of it — the complaint about time spent away, the specific nature of his need to hunt cast as something being done to her, the argument that had no real resolution because the resolution it kept circling was one he wasn't willing to make. He sat down and reached for the coffee pot with the automatic gesture of a man who has decided to be present for something unpleasant.
"Why do you need to hunt all the time?" Karen began, dispensing with any introductory approach.
Shane took a slow sip of the coffee, feeling the heat of it, thinking before he spoke. "Because I want to. You can do whatever you want — we have a babysitter you never use. You have people you could call, friends, a couple at least. Go out with them. I'm not gone every single day, and I am not responsible for sacrificing the things I like to do to sit home with you while you watch television."
Karen's posture tightened. "I'm not from here. I don't really like to do much except watch my shows and stay home."
She said it plainly, without apparent awareness of what it settled. But for Shane, the words landed in the exact center of the argument that had been building since before he left the service — the argument he had been hoping to avoid naming directly because naming it meant what came after the naming. He set the coffee down. "That is why this will never work," he said. "I am not going to give up everything I like in order to sit home and do nothing. I will compromise, and I have compromised, but nothing I do produces a situation where you are happy. I think we made a mistake. I left the military because you wanted me out. I came out, and now there's something else. I'm not doing this anymore." He paused, making sure the words were what he meant before he gave them. "I think we need to separate."
He stood up, and his voice had the quality of a decision completed rather than announced. He began gathering his gear for the morning. He did not stay for the argument that followed, because the argument was about the decision and the decision had been made, and the only thing staying for it could accomplish was making both of them say things that would be harder to carry later.
When he came back from his construction shift that afternoon, the house had a particular quality of emptiness that was different from simply being unoccupied. Her belongings were gone. The children's toys were gone. The specific textures that a family deposits into a space over years of living in it had been removed with an efficiency that suggested planning rather than impulse. She had moved states away to her parents' house, he would piece together over the following days. What he would learn more slowly, and with more sustained damage, was what she told the children about why — the careful, vicious architecture of lies that children believed because they came from a parent and because they were children, and because Karen understood that the most durable weapon in that particular war was the one aimed at the bond he had with his kids.
He poured what remained of that space into college and construction work. He kept hunting and fishing — not as indulgence but as necessity, the only remaining domain where the things he was good at and the things that restored him occupied the same activity at the same time.
It was at a rural extension campus that he met Arya.
She was everything that the previous years had not been. She was fluid and genuinely warm and entirely uncomplaining in the way of someone for whom complaining simply did not occur as an option, not because she suppressed it but because it genuinely did not seem to be her first response to difficulty. She studied literature, and they moved through their separate academic worlds with an ease that surprised him — she understood his silences and had no impulse to fill them with demands. She seemed to find in his quietness something she recognized rather than something she needed to correct. For a year, she was the soft place his calloused world could land at the end of the day, and he had not known how much he needed that kind of softness until it was present.
One Friday night, Shane was in his cramped college dorm room with three of his roommates, wings steaming on the countertop, the television loud with the particular volume that a major college football game required, the general atmosphere of a space that had been given over entirely to the uncomplicated purpose of watching something you cared about with people who also cared about it. His roommates were engaged in the parallel project of aggressively relieving him of his portion of the wings, which was exactly the kind of competitive nonsense that passed for affection among men who were not going to say that directly.
The phone rang. He answered it without looking away from the screen, where a play was developing that he had been reading for several seconds and wanted to see resolved.
"Hey, honey." Arya's voice, gentle and warm and genuinely without expectation. "I just wanted to check if you were watching the game."
Shane tracked the route developing on screen, felt the wings situation deteriorating on his left, and tried to split his attention enough to do both. "Arya, I'm right in the middle of something. Can I call you tomorrow?"
"Sure, honey," she said immediately. No reproach. No negotiation. Just the simple accommodation of someone who understood that he had a moment he was in and that she was not the enemy of it.
He called her tomorrow in his mind all the way through the second half of the game and into the night, the intention sitting comfortably in his chest, something pleasant waiting to be gotten to.
He was walking back across campus the next afternoon, cutting between the low brick buildings of Geneseo in the thin autumn light, with the specific and settled purpose of Arya already occupying the front of his mind. He had been short with her the night before, which he knew, and he intended to fix it in the way he knew how — not with an explanation but with presence, showing up and being better than the previous evening's version of himself.
He was on the path between the academic buildings and the dorms when he saw Lenny.
That stopped him.
Lenny lived in Mount Morris, twenty minutes away — he and Randy had been renting Shane's old house since the separation, keeping the place from sitting empty while Shane lived in the dorm through the week and came back on weekends to keep the house running. There was no version of Lenny being on this particular path at this particular time that made easy sense. Shane looked at his face and read it before any explanation arrived. Lenny's expression had none of its usual readiness in it. It was closed and careful in the way of someone carrying something they do not want to be carrying.
"Lenny." Shane kept his voice level. "What are you doing here?"
"Randy's up in your room," Lenny said. "Let's go up and see him."
Shane walked with him. His mind ran its inventory on the way — engine trouble, money, some problem back at the house that needed his specific attention. By the time they reached the dorm building he had a workable list. By the time they were climbing the stairs and he had another few seconds to read the quality of Lenny's silence, the list had narrowed considerably.
Randy was waiting in the hallway outside Shane's room. His face had the same closed quality as Lenny's, the easy grin he usually wore replaced by something flat and deliberate, the expression of a man who has decided exactly how he is going to do something difficult and is now doing it.
"Hey bud," Randy said. "Let's go inside."
They went in. The room was quiet. Randy walked to the center of it and stood there for a moment with the particular stillness of someone taking the breath before the words that cannot be recalled once they are spoken.
"Shane." His voice was stripped of everything except the information. "Arya is dead."
The words landed without producing anything recognizable as a response. They arrived as noise — static in the place where meaning should have assembled, hitting something that had not been constructed to receive this particular input and had simply stopped rather than attempt to process it. Shane heard himself speaking, heard the shapes of questions coming out of his mouth — what, how, why, what do I do — and was aware even as he said them that his mind had gone entirely blank behind them. The scaffolding of everything he had assumed about the next hours and days and years was simply absent, as if it had been present a moment ago and was not now.
The door opened. One of his dorm roommates leaned in, face drawn. "Shane. Phone."
He took the receiver without fully registering the act of taking it.
Karen's voice. Flat, cadenceless, arriving from the opposite end of whatever spectrum of human response this news could produce. "I heard your girlfriend died. At least you can't get married now."
Shane dropped the phone.
It hit the floor. He looked at the wall.
Randy and Lenny had not heard it. They were already talking, already moving through the explanation with the careful steadiness of men who had spent the drive from Mount Morris deciding exactly how to do this. A curve on the lake road near Arya's house on the south end of Conesus Lake — she had been living there with her family, only minutes from where she'd grown up. Whether she fell asleep or something crossed the road in front of her, no one could say for certain, but the car had gone into the boulder on the shoulder and rolled, and there had been a telephone pole. They had driven up from Mount Morris as soon as the word reached them, coordinating with Shane's dorm roommates to intercept any calls before Randy and Lenny could get there, trying to build a wall around the information until they were physically present for how it arrived.
They packed his things. He did not help in any meaningful sense. They drove him home to Mount Morris in silence, Lenny at the wheel, Randy in the back beside him, the autumn landscape moving past the windows in the gray and unremarkable way of scenery that does not know what has happened.
Shane carried one thought the entire way. It did not vary or develop or arrive anywhere. It simply repeated. Why didn't I talk to her more last night instead of being short with her.
The silence lasted weeks. People came to the house and went home again. They said things. The things bounced off whatever surface had come up between him and the rest of the world and did not reach anything that could respond to them.
Lenny, who had decided that the situation required a different approach than most people were attempting, showed up one afternoon and burst through the front door with the specific energy of someone generating a crisis rather than reporting one. He announced that there were thugs at a local bar who had threatened him in terms that required immediate collective response, and the nature of his announcement made clear what kind of response he had in mind.
Randy started reaching for things. Shane walked to the car without saying anything. He did not want to explain it. He wanted to move. He needed his body to be doing something that was not sitting in a house absorbing the continued presence of an absence. They drove to the bar, and Lenny told them to leave the hardware in the trunk for now, see how it developed.
Inside the bar, it became clear within a few minutes that Lenny had engineered the entire thing — the crisis was elaborate and, once Shane was present enough to read it, transparent, but it was effective in exactly the way Lenny had intended it to be. It created a situation that required attention and response and pulled Shane's focus outward into the present moment rather than backward into the loop. Within minutes someone put an alcoholic beverage in his hand. He drank it. He talked. He managed some version of a smile a few times during the night, strained and small but present.
The bar became his structure. He started going daily, working it first as a bouncer, then bartending, building himself into the life of the place with the same systematic investment he brought to anything he committed to. He understood, on some level he did not examine closely, that he was self-medicating — that the survivor's guilt which had no clean object and no resolution was being managed through chemistry and the specific numbing quality of a life organized around alcohol. He understood it and continued anyway.
He found David there. His oldest friend, the co-conspirator in the pre-dawn sled plan, was already deeper in the cycle than Shane was — drinking from sunrise to sunset, past the functional stage that Shane was still technically occupying. They partied together, and there was something that felt like belonging in it, the two of them back in the same orbit the way they had been as kids, even if the orbit was around something that was destroying them.
Shane was on a rooftop a few months later, summer sun hot through his boots, when the call came. David had overdosed. Too much, too soon, the margin he had been narrowing for years finally closed. Shane blamed himself with the immediate and total conviction of someone who has been waiting for a reason to do exactly that — if he had been there, if he had been paying attention to the right things instead of his own descent, he could have put himself between David and the outcome. He did not examine whether this was true. He simply carried it.
The descent deepened over the years that followed, though it remained functional in the narrow sense — he showed up, he did the work, he maintained the surface of a life. The maintenance cost more each year. Two days missed from work eventually, which for Shane was a failure of a kind he had not experienced in the adult years of his life.
Mike came to his door on the second morning. A coworker, someone who had been watching Shane's functioning decline with the quiet concern of a person who respected someone enough to actually show up when the alternative was polite distance. He stood on the step and said, gently, that they hadn't been off today. That people at the jobsite had been asking.
Shane offered the explanation that was close enough to truth to require the least construction — migraine, needed sleep. Mike registered it accurately and did not make an issue of the accuracy. He talked for a while, gently, in the way of someone who understood that this was not the moment for confrontation, and then he asked Shane if he wanted to come to a meeting.
Shane agreed.
He stayed clean from that day forward. Not easily, not without the ongoing cost that anyone who has done it honestly will tell you it extracts. But he stayed. He built the subcontracting business from that foundation, putting the same force of will that had once organized itself around the wrong things into the construction of something that held.
What Shane did not know — had no mechanism for knowing — was that his life had been something other than simply his own. The specific trajectory of it, the near-misses and the redirection points and the moments where the outcome that had been moving toward him arrived differently than the physics of the situation should have produced, had not all been the product of chance or his own decisions or the ordinary randomness that moves through every life. Something had been present alongside him, across the years, operating in the margins of his history at points where the margin was the difference between Shane continuing and Shane not.
He did not know that the entity that had ensured his survival at the various decision points had also been responsible for the quality of distraction that made him short with Arya on the night she died. Not as cruelty. As preservation — the calculation made, at a level he could not see, that the alternative was Shane in the car with her on the lake road, and that the world required Shane to continue. He could not know that his absence from David in the specific window of the overdose had similarly been arranged around an ambush that would have taken them both, that the timing of his being elsewhere had not been coincidence but intervention.
The cost of those interventions was real. The guilt he carried was real. He had paid for protections he had not consented to and did not know he had received.
In a space that celestial entities occupied and humans did not, two presences considered the situation in the way of beings for whom time was not the constraint it was for everyone else.
"Do you think he knows?" the first asked.
The second responded with a voice that moved the way wind moved over stone — not loud, not soft, carrying the particular resonance of something very old speaking with the patience that age produces. "I don't think so. Our residual energy signatures have been gone for a while, unless Veritas Alpha can move back in time. The pushes we gave were years ago. Shane has moved on his own for quite a while." A pause, carrying the specific quality of attention being paid to something not yet fully resolved. "This will be interesting. I hope they can stop what is coming. Shane has no idea that his mind is about to expand. The system will give him a power similar to mine and yours eventually. I have seen it. There are several outcomes possible, but he is ready, and Veritas Alpha is too."
The silence that followed was the silence of things in motion that had not yet arrived.