Location:Seven Peaks — North Camp; the West Yard
Date/Time:TC1857.02.09 – TC1857.02.15
The north camp sounded wrong at night, and Sera Vahn had never once managed to explain why to anybody who had not been in a Federation barracks.
It was the breathing. Four hundred and six people asleep under canvas made a sound like weather, and a barracks did not, because in a barracks everybody learned in the first month to breathe quietly enough that the person on the next bunk could not use it. Out here they had stopped bothering. It had taken them years to stop bothering, and she could hear the exact moment of it every night when she walked the line.
She walked the line every night. It was not required of her. She had begun doing it in the first winter because she could not sleep and had continued because by the time she could sleep it had become the thing she did instead.
Three more tents at the west end that had not been there when she went to bed.
