The family was doing the math. The trial mechanism, the Imperial Evaluator's presence, the Patriarch's walk across the grounds directly after. The math was not complicated.
"How's Seth taking it," Orion said.
Doran considered this with the specific thoughtfulness he applied to assessments of his older brother. "Carefully," he said. "He's being very careful right now."
Which was its own kind of answer.
They ran the morning session. Different from the previous six weeks. The urgency was gone, the specific pressure of building toward a defined deadline replaced by something more open-ended and in some ways harder to maintain a pace against.
Orion recognized the trap of that immediately.
Six weeks was not a long time.
He just had to keep that truth present enough that the openness didn't become relaxation.
