Mara Voss woke to silence.
Not the ordinary silence of her apartment at three in the morning—the refrigerator’s low hum, pipes ticking behind the walls, traffic whispering six floors below—but a silence so complete it seemed to press against her eardrums. The red digits on her bedside clock had vanished. Somewhere in the dark, a fan wound down with a soft mechanical sigh.
She lay still, listening.

