Morning came grey and reluctant, the kind of light that seemed to arrive out of obligation rather than conviction, and their daughter woke from it looking, for the first time since the crater, entirely like herself.
Her eyes had gone back to their ordinary warm brown, no trace of the pale silver blue that had frightened everyone the night before, and when she blinked awake against the tent's dim light her first act was to ask, with the indignant clarity of a four year old who has just noticed something unfair, why nobody had woken her for breakfast yet.
Sekar laughed before she could stop herself, a sound half relief and half disbelief, and pulled her daughter into a careful hug that avoided the still tender places on her small frame. "You've been asleep a long time, sayang. How do you feel."
"Cold, still, a little," their daughter said, considering the question with real seriousness. "And hungry. Why is everyone looking at me like I did something wrong?"
