The bond told him she was alive before he fully woke.
That was how it worked now Aelara had become the first thing his awareness checked, the way a tongue found a sore tooth, automatic and constant and not entirely comfortable in what it revealed about how thoroughly she'd reorganized his interior landscape. He lay on the narrow council room couch where he'd fallen asleep over documents sometime past midnight and took inventory through the connection before he opened his eyes. Distant. Moving. The particular quality of exhaustion that came from a night that had asked too much of a body that had already given enough.
The twins were with her. He couldn't feel them directly, but he could feel the part of her that was always oriented toward them, the way a compass needle was always oriented north regardless of what direction the compass itself was pointed.
