I should clarify: it wasn't that I didn't see it coming.
I had nine lives of experience reading the way people held themselves when they wanted something they hadn't said. I knew the particular quality of Kaien's silences. I knew how he looked at me when he thought I wasn't paying attention, which I always was. I had been aware, with the calm clarity of someone who had survived nine lives by knowing exactly what was happening around them at all times, that we were moving steadily in a particular direction.
What surprised me was how simple it was.
We had been in the study, late in the evening, working at the desk in the good light. I had been reading a particularly dense section of a pre-unification land survey, which was duller than it sounds and duller than that. He had been writing responses to the usual correspondence.
At some point I had set down my document and said, "I need to stop or I'll start mixing up the characters and catalogue everything wrong."
