The small meeting had run long.
Neva came out of the secondary conference room at the end of the lower corridor at six-forty, which was forty minutes later than she had planned, which meant Priva would have already picked up Bram and the boundary rotation debrief she had scheduled for seven was going to be late. She had three messages waiting and a folder she had meant to leave with the Arbiter proxy's assistant and had not left. She walked with the folder under one arm and her phone in her hand, reading the first message.
She was tired.
Not the surface tired of a long day — the deeper tired that came from sustained management of too many things at once without a break. The kind that settled into the jaw and the space behind the eyes and made the automatic functions of her body cost sli
