[ Carver's quiet for a long moment at that. Harold's words flow through him like a river. Some catch on the rocks and stay, but most of them just drift. It's so hard to focus. Every breath seems heavy. But he understands that something important is happening now, that Harold is trying to make him understand something, and this is always an intimacy whether it happens in conversation, by touch, or in an interrogation. There's something sacred about it.

Focus, he thinks, and his fingers twitch again. Focus, now. ]

Leah let Freya sleep in our bunks sometimes, [ Carver says after a while, softly. His gaze is focused elsewhere, on the horizon line. ] She wasn't supposed to. It was against the rules. But when the kids had nightmares after raids, it helped.

[ It helped him, once, when he was nineteen and scrubbing bone and brain matter out of his hair for the first time. Terrified that the next time they went out, they were all going to die. ]