Lyra had been awake before any of it started.
She did not sleep well most nights anymore, not since the case had ended and the strange quiet of after had settled over the Citadel, the kind of quiet that her body had not yet learned to trust. So she had been lying in the dark with her eyes open, listening to the building the way she sometimes did, when she felt the footsteps in the corridor.
She did not think about getting up.
She knew, the way she knew things, that this was not for her. The footsteps had gone past her door and stopped further down, and she felt, in the same instant, the specific quality of attention that meant Caelum was awake too, and that whatever this was, it had already found him first.
Her first instinct was to go to him.
She did not.
