DYER I don't move for a long time after the door closes.

The chamber feels altered by his absence, as though the air itself has been disturbed and not yet settled. The Shaman’s words linger like a residue, invisible but persistent, clinging to thought, to instinct, to the spaces between breath.

Bodie is still watching me. He has learned when silence is a question and when it is a boundary. This one is the latter.

I straighten at last, not because clarity has arrived, but because standing ...