She did not move for a very long time.
Both hands still on the pillar. Her face still turned toward where his voice had last come from. The warmth on her jacket, on the back of her hand, on her collarbone — it sat there.
Slow and thick and running, and she stood inside the sensation of it and assembled it the way she assembled everything, through what it was, through what it felt like, through what her thirty-one years of living fully inside the world of sensation told her it was.
Warm.
Thick.
Slow-moving.
Not water. Not any product she knew from domestic life. The viscosity was wrong for that. Too dense. Too — present. The kind of warmth that announced itself not just as temperature but as something biological, something that had been inside something else recently and had arrived on her from a direction she had not chosen or anticipated.
Her hand left the pillar.
