Chapter 373 --373
"Yes," she said.
He sat with the knowledge of it — the map in his head connecting to the view from up here, the two perspectives finding each other. She could see the specific satisfaction of it in his stillness.
"It’s the same city," he said. "From here and from inside it. It’s the same."
"Yes," she said.
"I thought—" He paused. "I thought they might feel different. The view of a place and the inside of it. But it is the same place."
She looked at the city. "The view gives you the shape," she said. "The inside gives you the texture. They’re both true. They need each other to be the full picture."
He thought about this. "Like the mechanism," he said. "What it does and how it works."
"Yes," she said. "Exactly like that."
He held his mechanism — he had brought it, she saw, carried in his lap on the way up. He turned it in his hands, not fiddling, just the comfortable contact of someone holding something familiar. He looked at the city.
Fen was still looking at the sky. She had not resumed the professional posture and Elara did not prompt her to. The sky was the sky. The afternoon was the afternoon. The fourth district information would be what it was when it was confirmed and not before.
For a long time the three of them simply occupied the flat stone in the summer afternoon and said very little. The city below continued its continuous existence. The river glinted where Samuel had found it. A bird — not the grey cat’s bird, a different one, the city was full of birds that nobody noticed because the city was also full of everything else — flew across the space between the palace wall and the nearest building and was gone.
"Elder sister," Samuel said.