Yuan didn't sleep. He'd stopped expecting to, most nights now, but this one had a different quality to its sleeplessness — not nerves exactly, or not only nerves. Something closer to standing at a fork in a road he couldn't see the end of either direction.
He spread the maps out on his bed sometime past midnight, careful with the brittle paper, and traced the mountain passes again, the annotated numbers, the quiet damning gap between what the northern garrisons were owed and what they'd actually been receiving.
They didn't say anything new the second time. They didn't need to.
