Dawn had not yet stained the horizon. A weak grayness hovered over the makeshift command ridge, turning every figure into a shadow stitched from the same colorless cloth. Six of those shadows gathered where the sand sloped toward the dead fire pits, lanterns banked low to keep their gathering secret.
Draven stood slightly apart, boots planted at the map-table improvised from two coffin lids laid edge-to-edge. Steam hissed up from the parchment where Azra's kettle of boiled seawater helped weigh the corners, the vapor carrying a faint smell of copper and kelp. Helyra leaned over that steam with her battered sextant, brass limbs ticking softly as she took fresh sights of the paling stars through the warped glass eyepiece.
"The amplifier's resonance window just shortened." Her voice always sounded like a carpenter's plane—steady, scraping truth out of wood. "Apogee shift places full strike in forty-eight hours. Not seventy-two."
