The afternoon sunlight over SIMS looked harmless from the outside.
That was the first thing Fang noticed as they returned to the institute grounds. It fell in broad, clean bands across the entrance courtyard, touching the polished stone and glass of the main buildings with a kind of ordinary brightness that would have reassured anyone who had not just spent the morning staring into a buried chamber that seemed to know his blood.
Ren walked beside him without speaking. Not because he had nothing to say, but because Fang knew the silence. It was the sort Ren wore when his mind was moving through too many layers at once, filing facts, trimming possibilities, and deciding which consequences could be postponed and which could not.
