He looked at her.
"Before the border negotiations," she said. The Chief's voice trying to maintain the flatness that the subject required. "He said I seemed — distracted." A pause. "He stopped asking."
The Eye of Truth noted: pulse elevated. Stress markers in the qi pathway consistent with shame.
He said nothing.
He pulled the towel free.
She looked away immediately.
Then looked back.
Because she was a cultivator, and cultivators assessed threats, and the assessment required looking, and what she was looking at — the Eye of Truth noted her own pupils expanding, the specific, involuntary dilation of a visual system that had registered something in the significant category — was the specific, comprehensive, un-managed presentation of a man who had been built by his own cultivation history and who was, at his current stage, expressing that history in every relevant measurement.
"Senior," she said.
Her voice was not the Chief's voice.
"—That is not—" She stopped. "That is."
