Chapter 358: The Faster Word
The standoff settled into a rhythm over the next three days.
Kai's camp sat on one side of the marker-square. Edra's sat on the other. Between them the dust stayed flat and empty, the way ground stays empty when both sides have agreed, without saying so, not to cross it. Soren measured the frame every morning. Edra's people measured it every morning too, an hour later, as if the order mattered.
It did not. The numbers came out the same.
There was a shape to the days that Kai had not expected. He had thought a standoff would feel like a held breath, every hour stretched thin with watching. Instead it felt almost like the western survey work, before any of this — wake, read, eat, walk the line, read again. Two camps doing the same job a stone's throw apart, careful not to let the closeness turn into anything either side would have to answer for.
