Running.

It’s hard, because her mind is racing and trying to unpack what’s going on, because that was Mynx, but it shouldn’t have been, because Mynx… she hasn’t seen Mynx since Salib. She’d been so focused on Bella, saving Bella, worrying about Bella, that everything else had just been noise. And the worry is a servant gnawing on its own tail, a loop of stress that unspools the more she runs and becomes not a thought with words but a burning in the elements of her self, a raw chafing discomfort—

But she is running, see.

And running is one of the best things in the whole wide universe.

It is her whole body optimized for purpose. It is an explosion of intent and capability. It is a speed so reckless that the mind becomes a thing of sensations and reactions and words go away, thoughts are sublimated, and there is just the raw animal power of a human being who has pushed herself to this purpose, who has become a thing that runs, whose will is not befuddled and worrying and stymied but effortlessly expressed, and why couldn’t ruling an empire be the same way? Why did it have to be a cramped closet of a thing, shut up in the dark of the mind with so many books and reminders and scales?

It is like piloting the plover of the self.

And so Redana does not process what soothes that chafe. She does not understand why she is so happy that she laughs, a convulsion of muscles, even as she flings herself through her ship, [i]her[/i] ship, alongside Bella. All she knows is that in this moment of stress, when she should be tearing herself apart, she instead feels powerful, light-headed, capable of finding Mynx no matter where she tries to hide.

And that, too, is a gift.