By the time the physicians had finished picking glass and shrapnel out of the wounded in the lower ward, the scorch mark in the courtyard had cooled enough to touch, and touching it told us exactly nothing. I crouched over it a second time in the grey light before dawn, gauntlet bare, palm flat against stone that should have been warm from a night of fire and wasn't.
"Cold," I said. "Colder than the air around it."
*Four degrees below ambient,* Noa Genesis confirmed. *The same differential I recorded at the Cathedral. Whatever process removes him from a location also removes heat from it, as though his departure is not travel in any conventional sense but subtraction.*
"Subtraction of what?"
*I would need to know what he is made of to answer that. I do not.*
