The violet light pulsing from Len’s ribs was not a steady glow. It possessed a distinct, gut-deep rhythm.
It swelled every two seconds. It stretched from a thin thread of amethyst light into a broad, blazing bright band thick as a thumb-width, casting a sharp purple light across the scrubbed pine grain of the frame stand table. With every pulse, a sharp, body tingle shook along the edges of his collarbones, down into his pelvis, and through the marrow of his shins.
It felt like the physical tiredness that followed hauling a thirty-pound post pack up twenty miles of frozen mountain pass. That deep, ache-heavy thickness in the muscles where every fiber had been pushed to its elastic limit, rebuilt stronger, and hardened by cold air and hard stone.
“Why doesn’t it give a number?” Len asked, his voice low, dry, and strained. “In the border towns, the tavern runners talk about levels like they’re counting copper coins. They say a man is eighty percent of the way to his next perk, or ninety percent.”
Ivara made that dry, clicking sound in her throat that served as her only expression of contempt.
She didn’t answer with words right away. Instead, she laid her drafting pencil across the rag paper, reached across her torso with her single right hand. Then she unbuttoned the horn button on the cuff of her right sleeve.
