Chapter 360: The Square They Wouldn't Leave
They split the night into three watches.
Kai took first, Soren took middle, Mira took the watch before dawn, when the gathering had spiked twice already and seemed, Soren said, "to prefer the hour nobody wants to be awake for." None of them slept well. All of them slept in shifts close enough to the markers that waking up meant three steps, not thirty.
By the second day of watches, Edra's camp had matched the pattern without being told. Her people split their own nights the same way, a stone's throw across the dust. Nobody had agreed to it out loud. It had simply become the obvious shape for two camps that both wanted to be standing up when something finally happened.
"They're doing what we're doing," Mira said on the morning of the seventh day, watching the night shift change across the gap.
"She told us she wants a fair race," Kai said. "This is what fair looks like when nobody's racing anymore."
