wasn’t watching him. What I noticed was the change in the quality of the room’s attention, the way you notice when a large body of air shifts, the atmospheric register of something unexpected. I looked up.
The admiral was very still.
Not the still of someone reading — the still of someone who has encountered something that has temporarily suspended other functions. His eyes were on a specific point in the program, and then they moved, slowly, through the audience, with the deliberate scanning of someone who knows how to locate
They landed on me.
My stomach did something that I don’t have a precise word for.
Recognition.
That’s what his expression said, before he arranged it back into the composed neutrality of his public face. Recognition — the look of encountering something known, something expected, something he had perhaps been anticipating.
He stood up.
When Admiral Carter stood up, the auditorium — which had been operating at the specific noise level of nine hundred teenagers in a large enclosed space — went quiet in the involuntary
