The field had unfrozen and the field was still a field and the field still had all the same mathematics it had before her father stepped back and she had approximately the same amount of herself left to work with which was not very much and none of that had changed.
What had changed was her.
She could not have explained it precisely — the specific quality of something that had shifted in the thirty seconds of frozen time, in the conversation with her father, in the refusal. She was more injured than she had been before the freeze and more exhausted and the left side was sending her information she was actively ignoring and none of the physical facts had improved.
But she had refused him.
