Much later, though, she will remember an instant after that touch, when the tips of the man’s fingers glimmered like the cut ends of the harpoon. A gossamer-thin thread of light-under-the-heat had seemed to flicker from her to him. She will remember, too, that for a moment that thread of light illuminated others: a whole tracework of jagged lines spreading all over him like the spiderwebbing that follows a sharp impact in brittle glass. The impact site, the center of the spiderweb, was somewhere near the back of his head. Nassun will remember thinking in that instant: He’s not alone in there.
