He had gone very still again, but it was not the old stillness — the erasure stillness, the make-yourself-small stillness. This was something different. She watched the shock move through him like a stone dropped into still water — the concentric rings of it passing across his face in the span of a second, surprise and disbelief and something beneath both of them that she could not immediately name. His hands, still on his lap, had closed into fists. She did not think he knew that they had.
She held his gaze for a moment. Then she straightened, and turned, and began to walk back toward the steps.
The corridor erupted behind her in the careful, barely-suppressed way that imperial corridors erupt — with the specifically restrained quality of people who know better than to shout, but who are communicating their astonishment to each other in every other available register simultaneously.
She climbed the three steps.
She did not look back.
---
