Vandar
Hellin’s Surcease

In which Val Con is not the only one who can sense danger and come to the rescue.

It’s not just the Loop, then, or if it is, it’s using Val Con’s own insecurities against him. The mission he let the genie out of the bottle for is to ensure Miri’s safety, and on some level he still believes that she’ll never be safe as long as she’s around him. Though Miri’s working on that, and has made significant progress by the end of the chapter.

Val Con’s hope that Miri would not be able to hear him the way he hears her is, it seems, to be disappointed, except in the narrow sense that she, being more visually-oriented, doesn’t hear music but sees a pattern. Which may be why he missed it when she alluded to the fact; he doesn’t have the right metaphor in place to immediately catch what she was talking about. Or it may well just have been that he had other things on his mind at that precise moment.