The last thing the main force of three hundred players had done before going silent was scream.
Not the combat scream, not the coordinated battle cry of people executing a strategy, but the specific unravelling sound of people who had encountered something the strategy did not account for, and then nothing, and the nothing was worse than the screaming because at least the screaming meant something was still happening.
Liam had been listening to the silence for four minutes and twenty seconds while he finished the soup.
Elizabeth sat two feet to his left on her own rock, close enough that the heat from his shoulders reached her bare arm, far enough that she could claim it was coincidental. She watched him work with the expression she wore when she was trying to look like she was doing something else. She had been doing this since Day 1 and had not gotten better at it.
