Soren woke up and the first thing he did was check his arm.
Nothing.
No new sentence.
No warmth rising under the skin in someone else's hand.
No timer ticking in the corner of his vision.
No DING waiting with a deadline attached.
He lay still and read the silence the way he'd read the writing. With suspicion.
Quiet was not the same as safe.
Quiet could be a pause between sentences.
He'd spent too long being written to trust a blank page just because it was blank this morning.
But he reached for the channel out of habit, the way you reach for a tooth that got pulled, and found the socket empty.
The Author wasn't thin in his mind anymore nor there at all.
He didn't celebrate it.
◆◆◆◆
The hand was the problem.
He sat up and turned it over in the gray light.
The burn from the severance had scabbed and started to heal everywhere except the path the nib had traveled.
That line stayed raw.
