# Chapter 125

Aria's POV

December arrived and the institute's second residency ended.

Beth brought the final cohort outputs to Shadow Peak on a Thursday, the same way she'd brought the first — not as a report but as thinking, still warm from the work that had produced it. She set the documentation on my desk and sat across from me and we talked for two hours before either of us looked at the pages.

This had become our method. The talking first, because the talking produced something the reading alone wouldn't. The conversation between two people who'd been building alongside each other for years, who could speak in the...