Ting.
The sensation arrived not as sound but as contact — the specific, internal quality of the connection between him and Tommy making itself felt in the specific moment when it was most needed, a thread of cold clarity cutting through the spiraling quality of his thoughts with the precise, surgical efficiency of something that did not have the capacity for panic and therefore could not transmit it.
Only clarity....
His thoughts stilled.
Not emptied — stilled, in the specific way of water that has been agitated and has been given the condition it needed to return to its natural surface. The immediate picture resolved itself from the noise it had been becoming back into the clean, factual composition it had always been: the transformed team, the compound eyes, the crumbling constructions, Brian's occupied face, and the specific, cold arithmetic of what was available against what was required.
Tommy.
