She straightened. Adjusted her court dress. Took inventory of herself with the same systematic attention she gave to everything else — the fatigue was profound, the kind that had moved past the muscles and into the bones and from the bones into something deeper, the accumulated weight of fifteen days during which sleep had been a brief and irregular visitor and food had been whatever was placed on her desk at intervals that she didn't always track. Her hands were steady, which was what mattered. Her head was clear enough, which was also what mattered.
She was not weak. She needed to be precise about that distinction, at least to herself, in the privacy of a dark passage with nobody watching who counted as watching. She was not weak. She was running a body at a deficit that would eventually require settlement, and the body was beginning to present the bill. Those were different things.
