At a quarter to midnight, Len Vey awoke.
He didn’t wake with a start, nor did he bolt upright with the cold, spark shock of fight-or-flight rush that had ripped him from sleep for nine in a row midnights. There was no siren sounding from the town pumping towers, no heavy boot kicking at his door bolt. No bitter taste of copper melted rock waste burning under his tongue.
His eyes simply opened in the dark, his mind rising into clear, wakeful mind as smoothly as a cork floating to the surface of a still pond.
His body felt rested in a way he had almost forgotten was biologically possible. The deep, gnawing tiredness that had hollowed out his temples had pulled back. The dull throb in his broken left forearm bone had settled into a steady, quiet warmth beneath the cedar splints. And the sharp pinch in his fifth and sixth ribs was reduced to an ache that reminded him only that he was nineteen years old and mending in the sun.
He lay still for two minutes, listening.
Across the room, Tavi Rusk breathed with the slow, deep, unbroken rhythm of deep sleep, his arm still thrown across the straw pallet, his profile outlined in faint, pale silver by the light coming through the window.
