Aelara moved before she decided to move.
That was the training years of it, the borderlands kind that didn't come from drills but from the specific education of being hunted, of learning that the body knew things half a second before the brain caught up. She had the door fully open and was in the corridor before Rhea had rounded the far corner.
"Stay," she said to the twins without turning around.
Caelum said: "That's not—"
"Stay."
She heard him stop.
The east archive room was four doors down. The corridor was empty, which was wrong there should have been a staff member at the document table outside it, the morning archivist who had been there every day since they arrived, a quiet older man who sorted incoming materials before they were logged. His chair was empty. The small stack of papers he'd been working through was on the floor, fanned out across the stone in the particular pattern of something knocked over fast rather than dropped.
