On the bed: a nine-year-old child, breathing. Just breathing. The deep particular sleep of a body remembering what it was.
Gabriel stood at the foot of the bed.
Uriel set the spear down -- it simply ceased to be in his hand, the way those things ceased when they were done being needed.
He breathed out once. Slowly. The particular exhalation of someone who has done the thing they came to do.
"Better," he said.
Gabriel did not look at him. She was looking at the child's face. At the gentle breathing. At the yellow walls.
"Much better," she agreed.
They left the way they had come. The mother's voice from the hall -- small, trembling, six hours of terror distilled into two syllables -- arrived as they passed through it.
