Munachi bowed her head slightly toward the woman on the stairway, murmured something too quiet for the translator to catch, and slipped away down a side path without another word, leaving Noah standing there with a stranger who had, in the span of about four seconds, made him forget he'd been in the middle of a sentence.
"Hi," Noah said. Brilliant. "I'm Noah. Noah Eclipse,"
"Hibanna," she said, and something about the way she said it made it sound less like an introduction and more like a fact he should already know.
She moved toward him without hurry, the kind of walk that didn't ask a room for attention because it had never once had to. Tall, built with a kind of coiled strength that showed in her shoulders and the set of her stride rather than anything overt, and Noah's brain, unhelpfully, reached straight for Lucy. Not the face. The posture. The sense that whatever she decided, the room would eventually agree with her whether it wanted to or not.
