“Give me four fifteen-breath sets on the gravel first, Mina,” Seyun said as he came down from the eastern low roof wall. “If you read my wrist while I’m just standing here thinking about the sunrise, you’ll only measure a man sitting on a rock. Read it after I have worked for an hour on my own two marks.”
Mina studied his face in the crisp morning light, noted the calm set of his jaw, and nodded once. She sat on the granite step and set her brass sand glass on the stone beside her.
Daro Kesh and Bel Sar had just come up the trail from the hospice carrying their weapons. Without ceremony, the two older fighters stepped onto the lower terrace gravel to give Seyun live, separated targets for his morning foundation hour. Across four fifteen-breath sets—each separated by the full five-minute sitting rest Mina needed—Seyun worked purely within his Deeper Bronze Answering Edge.
When Daro Kesh and Bel Sar stepped onto the lower terrace gravel to give Seyun his hour of ordinary morning foundation work before Mina’s pulse check, neither of the older men asked a single question about the sunrise on the low roof wall. Daro had witnessed the reconciliation between Seyun and Nara two evenings ago. To ask whether a Crown echo had arrived anyway would have been to question whether their word had been honest.
