She was in her room and she had not slept.
He could tell from the door — she did not answer immediately, which was unusual for her, and when she did answer the word she used was the word for enter rather than the word for come in, and the distinction was small but she was precise about small things and the precision had slipped. He went in.
She was sitting on the floor with her back against the bed frame and her wrists resting on her knees, channels visible, and she was looking at them with the expression of someone reading a page they have read many times but that now contains a sentence they had not noticed before.
He sat on the floor across from her. He set the coldlight bowl he had carried from the corridor between them. He waited.
She said: "They're different."
He said: "Show me."
She held her wrists toward the coldlight. The channels on her wrists — the wide, deep grooves carved by the catastrophic reading three years ago — were the same physical dimensions they had always been. But the quality of them had changed. He could see it in the way the coldlight moved over them. Before, the channels had been inert, structural — the record of something that had happened and stopped. Now they had the quality of something that had been used for its designed purpose and retained the memory of that use. Like a path that looks different after rain has run through it. Cleaner and more defined, both at once.
He said: "They conducted something at full volume."
She said: "Yes."
He said: "Are they—"
She said: "They don't hurt. That's the first thing I checked." She turned her wrists over, pressed them together gently, released. "They feel — open. In a way they didn't before. As if something was blocking the channel before and has now been cleared."
He sat with that.
He said: "The soul energy you read from the southern Soul-Lord. Three years ago. What came back through you."
She said: "Yes. I think — I think it was still in there. In the channels. Not gone, not inert. Just — lodged." She looked at her wrists. "Whatever passed through them last night moved through at enough volume to — push it clear."
He said: "And now."
She said: "Now they're what they were supposed to be. Before I used them for something they weren't built for." She paused. A long one, the kind that had decisions moving through it. "I don't know what that means yet. For what I can do. For whether the overreach damage is — gone, or only changed."
He said: "We find out."
She looked at him.
He said: "Not today. But we find out. The same way we found out everything else — by being patient and paying attention and not assuming the answer before we have the data."
She looked at him for a moment longer. Then something in her expression shifted — not relief, not quite, but something adjacent. The expression of a person who has been alone with a problem for a long time and has just remembered that alone is not a requirement.
She said: "The southern working."
He said: "Yes."
She said: "We don't know yet if it worked."
He said: "No."
She said: "Casvar will know before we do."
He said: "Casvar knows now. He knew the moment it hit." He looked at the coldlight bowl. "The question is what it did when it arrived."
She said: "And whether it was enough."
He said: "And whether it was enough."
They sat on the floor of her room with the coldlight bowl between them and the channels on her wrists open in the pale light, and outside the citadel Valdrek held its permanent dark, and somewhere south of them, at a distance neither of them could calculate, twelve hundred unfinished directions had arrived at something and either finished there or hadn't.
They waited.