Chapter Forty Five: What We Carry

The new shift did not know their names.

Julian noticed this before he noticed the daylight at the end of the corridor. A woman with a canvas lunch bag had taken the station nearest the door. The man relieving the overnight transportation lead wore a tie patterned with small blue fish. They received their briefings, asked questions, adjusted chairs still warm from other bodies.

On the main display, a fuel delivery changed routes.

Julian followed it automatically. An obstruction on the original road. A longer approach from the west. The receiving hospital acknowledged the delay; the depot confirmed the driver had enough fuel for the additional distance. A second facility, whose delivery depended on the same vehicle, accepted a revised arrival time.

The woman with the lunch bag approved the change.

She did not turn toward the students.

For a moment, Julian waited for a part someone had missed.

Beside him, Theo was watching the same transaction. His fingers rested on the edge of a keyboard he no longer needed to touch.

“Okay,” he said.

It sounded like permission he was giving himself.

Across the room, someone peeled a handwritten note from a monitor and replaced it with another. A printer drew in paper with a dry mechanical cough. The air still smelled of old coffee, warm electronics, and too many people wearing yesterday’s clothes.

The work continued.

Farrell found them near the table where the remains of breakfast had hardened beneath clear plastic lids. Mateo had been holding an unopened yogurt long enough for condensation to collect between his fingers. Aisha was reading the same paragraph on a handover sheet for the third time. Leena sat with her phone faceup beside an untouched bagel.

Kael stood slightly apart, his gray journal closed beneath one hand.

“Your transport’s ready,” Farrell said.

None of them moved immediately.

He looked toward the operations floor.

“We’ve completed a full shift transition in the pilot regions. The approach is holding as additional regions adopt it. There are still compromised services. There are places where recovery will take days.”

Julian watched him choose what came next.

“All nine buses have been accounted for against the shelter manifests. The receiving sites have reconciled the passengers. The firefighter with the burns is stable.”

The last fact settled somewhere Julian had not realized was still waiting.

“Other areas weren’t as fortunate,” Farrell said. “A county outside the restored corridors has confirmed two deaths involving a delayed ambulance. We don’t have enough information yet to tell the families precisely what failed.”

Aisha lowered the handover sheet.

Farrell let the room remain quiet.

“There will be investigations. There should be. But I want you to leave knowing that people are alive because of what you did here. That isn’t a projection.”

Mateo set the yogurt down.

“Do they know it’s still trying?”

“The incoming teams? Yes.”

“The people above them.”

Farrell’s face changed slightly. Fatigue showed most clearly when he stopped arranging it.

“They will hear it from me.”

An aide approached with a tablet, waited until Farrell glanced at him, then indicated something on the screen.

“For contingency planning,” the aide said, looking at the six, “what availability should we put down if a region encounters something the current teams can’t resolve?”

The question was polite. There was a blank field waiting for an answer.

Julian’s first thought was that they should stay close to an airport.

His second was his mother, somewhere in a shelter, sleeping in a room full of strangers.

He could picture both arrangements. He could calculate the travel time between them.

He could not find an answer that did not feel like leaving someone.

“Route further requests through me,” Farrell told the aide. “Don’t put them on a roster.”

The aide nodded and moved away.

Farrell looked back at them.

“Go get some sleep.”

Julian picked up his bag. The plastic inside it crackled.

He had forgotten the smell until moving it released a faint breath of smoke.

The light outside felt like a forgotten language.

It lay across the pavement and the clipped grass beyond the security barrier, catching in the windows of parked cars. Somewhere nearby, a bird repeated three notes with the confidence of a thing whose morning had gone according to plan. Julian stopped beneath the sound. For days, daylight had meant a change in what could reach them: fire visible on a ridge, smoke lifting enough to see the road, another hour without a message. Here it warmed the back of his hand. He turned his wrist slightly, feeling the warmth move over skin that had been cold for so long he had stopped noticing.

Aisha stood beside the open vehicle door, looking up.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

He waited.

“I forgot about birds.”

He looked toward the tree. Neither of them could see it, though a thin branch moved near the top. They stood listening through another repetition, and for those few seconds Julian had nowhere else he needed to look.

Then the driver asked whether everyone had their belongings, and the small moment closed around the practical business of leaving.

They traveled north in a full-size van large enough for them to avoid touching and too small for any of them to lie down properly. Someone had supplied sandwiches, water, fruit, and a bag of miscellaneous snacks.

Mateo examined the contents.

“Six people,” he said. “One packet of cheese crackers.”

“The final simulation,” Theo murmured.

“Don’t start anything,” Leena said.

She took the crackers.

Mateo watched her open them.

“Decisive. I respect it.”

For a little while they managed something that resembled conversation. Ben had sent nineteen messages to the group thread, the last seven increasingly elaborate accusations that Theo was avoiding a debt of three dollars. Ethan’s messages were shorter. Where are you? Then, several hours later, Do you need anything? Theo began composing a response to Ben, abandoned it halfway through, and let the phone rest on his leg.

Zara had sent a photograph of the common room. Someone’s abandoned sweatshirt lay over the back of a chair, one sleeve trailing almost to the floor. Tamar’s shoes were visible at the edge of the frame. The picture had no obvious subject, and Julian enlarged it before realizing that was what he liked about it. He knew the view from that seat. He had sat there while Ben complained about an assignment and while Mateo ate something over a bowl he had no intention of washing until someone mentioned it.

Across from him, Theo was still worrying about the systems they had left behind.

“They need to check the backup connections when they come online. If those start carrying the same false instructions…”

His eyes closed.

They waited.

“Then what?” Mateo asked softly.

Theo snored.

“Good briefing,” Mateo murmured.

Leena folded her jacket and wedged it between Theo’s head and the window before the next bend could wake him. He shifted toward it without opening his eyes, and she settled back with the crackers in her lap.

The road unspooled beneath them. Beyond the city, bare branches gave way to trees carrying the first thin green of the season. At a service station, half the pumps were wrapped in yellow tape, and a line of cars waited beside the working ones. Farther north, traffic lights blinked above an intersection where an officer stood directing vehicles with slow, economical movements. The country had begun doing things by hand again.

Julian caught himself studying the queue, the gaps, the officer’s tired shoulders. A change in timing could clear the backed-up lane. If the truck waited another…

The van carried him past.

For several seconds he continued arranging the intersection in his head. Then the road curved, the view disappeared behind a low building, and he was left with his own reflection in the glass. He sat back. The driver knew where they were going. Someone else would decide when to stop for fuel. Julian loosened his grip on the water bottle and discovered how deeply its ridges had pressed into his palm.

Beside him, Aisha had stopped reading her messages. Her phone rested between her hands. The cut along her jaw had darkened at the edges, a small rough interruption in skin he remembered without it. He knew she was tired; he could see that without Catalyst. Everything beyond it required more care.

“Do you want me to move?” he asked.

She turned.

“So you can stretch out.”

For a second, he thought she might say yes. He began collecting the water bottle from between their seats.

“No,” she said. “You can stay.”

“Okay.”

Several miles passed before her shoulder settled against his. The pressure was slight enough that she could have taken it back without either of them acknowledging it. He adjusted his arm so the seam of his sleeve would not press against her cut, and she moved with him, finding a place to rest. Her eyes remained closed. Beyond the driver’s shoulder, the road dipped between low wooded slopes, sunlight moving through the branches and across their knees.

There had been hours when he had known where Aisha’s attention was going almost before she did, his own perception meeting hers without the delay of explanation. He had trusted that closeness because there had always been something to do with it. Here, with her breathing gradually deepening beside him, he could think of half a dozen things he wanted to say and no reason to wake her for any of them.

He wondered whether she would stay where she was when she woke. Then he felt embarrassed for wondering while she was so exhausted, and a little relieved that, for once, her eyes were closed and she could not watch him work through it.

For now, he knew that she had asked him to stay.

It was enough to keep very still for.

By the time Neurovia appeared beyond the last bend, the pale afternoon sky had spread across its windows. Aisha stirred when the van slowed, lifting her head and drawing a hand over her face. Her shoulder left a place against his arm that felt unexpectedly cool.

Julian had expected the sight of the campus to produce relief. Instead, for an instant, he could not reconcile the building with the places his body had been. The clean lines of the entrance belonged to a world that had continued existing while ash fell into water and people argued over which road was safe. A delivery cart stood near the side entrance. Someone had propped a service door open with a yellow wedge.

He remembered coming here with his parents, watching the building through a different window and wondering what would happen once they left him inside. He had believed then that the difficult part would be getting in. Now he watched the familiar doors approach and tried to remember what he had been worried about on the morning he left for spring break.

Ben was outside before the driver had finished parking.

“You look like you a roadside possum,” he told Theo.
Theo stood on the pavement, blinking slowly.
“Seriously, man. You’ve had all van ride to workshop a comeback.”
“My best material died with my phone battery. And your unanswered texts.”

Then Ben stepped forward and put both arms around him. Theo’s hand remained suspended beside his own bag. After a moment, it closed on the back of Ben’s shirt.

Ethan came around the vehicle and took Julian’s bag.

The plastic inside shifted, releasing the smell. Ethan’s eyes moved to Julian’s face, then away.

“Food’s upstairs.”

Tamar waited beside the entrance with her arms folded. When Aisha approached, she unfolded them.

“Who did that?”

Aisha touched her jaw.

“It’s fine.”

“That wasn’t the question.”

“No,” Aisha said.

Tamar studied her a moment longer, then held the door.

Zara was in the common room, surrounded by the evidence of preparations no one had agreed to call preparations. Plates had been set out, a pot stood on a folded towel, and the chairs had been moved into a loose arrangement with room for six more people. The room smelled of rice, broth, and warmed bread. Julian’s stomach tightened so abruptly it hurt. He was almost certain he had eaten this morning but his body was telling him otherwise.

“Don’t sit in that one,” Zara told Mateo. “Ben spilled something.”

“An allegation,” Ben said.

“The cushion is wet.”

“Evidence can be misleading.”

Mateo selected another chair with exaggerated caution, moving it far enough from the disputed cushion that Ben had to turn sideways to get past. Leena reached for the bowls. Someone asked where the spoons were while someone else was already passing them, and Julian found himself with food in front of him before he had decided where to put his hands.

For several minutes, hunger made conversation unnecessary. Spoons struck bowls; bread moved around the table in a basket that had to be passed back when Ben took the last piece without noticing Theo’s outstretched hand. Theo burned his mouth and tried to hide it, unsuccessfully. Julian ate slowly at first, then realized that most of his bowl was gone and that the ache beneath his ribs had begun to ease.

Ethan sat opposite him.

“Your family?”

“Safe. Still at the shelter.”

“My dad says if they need…” He stopped, searching for a useful scale. “Anything. He said to ask.”

Julian looked down at the bread in his hand.

“Thanks.”

He could not have explained why the offer nearly undid him. His family needed so many things he could not yet name, and he had been trying to sort them into questions small enough to ask someone. Julian tore the bread in half, taking longer over it than he needed to, while Ethan reached for his water and allowed him the time.

Around them, conversations began and joined one another. Leena showed Zara a message from her mother. Aisha answered Tamar in a low voice. Ben had started recounting something that had happened to him during the outage, doing voice impersonations of his family. Julian missed the beginning, caught enough of the middle to know Ben was making himself sound more useful than he had been, and looked up just as Zara said so.

He laughed with food still in his mouth. For a moment he had to concentrate on swallowing, and by the time he could speak, the conversation had gone somewhere else. Nobody waited for him to catch up. He could sit there and miss things. He could ask later, or let them remain missed.

The room gradually grew familiar around him.

Then Tamar asked, “How did they decide who to bring in?”

Aisha set down her spoon.

“They started with the five who went to CISA before. Julian, Mateo, Leena, Theo, and me.”

“Farrell already knew how we worked,” Mateo said. “We knew the systems they’d shown us. There wasn’t much time to get anyone else up to speed.”

“Wasn’t much time to get us there, either,” Theo said. “They couldn’t even reach everyone.”

Julian rubbed his thumb against a rough place on the table. Somewhere, while people had been trying to find him, he had been standing in water with ash settling on his shoulders.

“They didn’t get me out until Friday,” he said. “The others had already started.”

Tamar looked at him, then down at her bowl.

“My phone was useless for most of Thursday.”

“Ours too,” Zara said. “We kept getting messages hours after they were sent.”

Ethan leaned back.

“I kept thinking somebody would call.”

Julian looked at the hands resting beside Ethan’s bowl. He could picture him waiting with his phone nearby, listening whenever it made a sound. Ethan had taken his bag before he was asked and had been finding things to carry or refill since they came through the door. Julian wondered how many times he had offered to help during the outage and been told there was nothing he could do from there.

“They were trying to find five people across the country,” Aisha said. “Getting everyone together would have taken longer.”

Zara glanced at Kael.

“And you were still here.”

He nodded.

“Morse came and got me.”

For a moment, the room was quiet. Kael’s journal lay beside his plate. He moved it farther from a ring of spilled water, and Ben looked at Theo.

“So you were selected on the strength of your previous customer service.”

“Apparently they’d forgotten it.”

“National emergency. Records get lost.”

Theo gave him a tired, unwilling smile. Leena reached for the pot and found it empty.

“Is there more?”

“Yeah,” Ethan said.

He collected her bowl on his way to the kitchenette. Julian watched him go, then pushed the bread basket toward Tamar, who took a piece without looking up. Someone asked Ethan to bring water too. The small requests passed easily around the room.

***

Julian stayed beneath the shower until the water cooled, though there was no visible dirt left to wash away. Each time he thought the smell had gone, he caught it again: burned brush, bitter smoke, fabric soaked in dirty water. His borrowed sweatshirt lay on the bathroom floor. He stepped around it when he got out and left it there while he dried himself.

In his room, the bed had remained exactly as he had left it, one corner of the blanket caught beneath the mattress. Wind moved the upper branches of a tree outside the window, brushing their shadows across the wall. He stood with a clean shirt in his hands and looked at the bed for longer than made sense. He could pull the blanket free, get under it, and sleep until someone woke him. His mother would be trying to rest in a room where people walked past her, where someone else decided when the lights went off.

He put on the shirt and called her.

This time she answered.

The connection broke twice in the first minute. Julian waited through each silence, holding the phone still as though movement might make it worse. When her face returned the second time, she was looking down at something beside her.

“Did you arrive?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Did you eat?”

“Yeah.”

“What?”

He told her. She asked whether he had eaten the bread too, and he almost smiled at the familiar suspicion that he might be defining a meal too generously. Only after he answered did she begin telling him about the shelter. A volunteer had found a different place for his grandmother to sleep, farther from the door. His father had gone with Luis to find out when they might be allowed back into the neighborhood. They still did not know about the house.

Julian sat on the edge of the bed. Behind his mother, someone passed carrying a folded blanket, and she moved her foot to let them through. He wanted to see more of the room, to know where she was sleeping and whether there was a chair for his grandmother. He also knew how quickly he would begin looking for things to fix in a place he could not reach.

“Have you slept?” he asked.

“Some.”

He recognized the answer. He had used it himself.

His mother shifted the phone and lowered her voice.

“Who’s looking after you?”

“I’m okay, Mom.”

“I know you can be okay. That isn’t what I asked.”

Julian looked toward the door. Ethan had carried his bag without asking what was in it. There had been food waiting, a place at the table. In the van, Aisha had slept against his shoulder, and he had spent part of the journey worrying that moving his arm would wake her. Remembering that now, with his mother on the screen, brought a small, private embarrassment. He had been warm. He had wanted the drive to last.

“Ethan made sure I ate,” he said. “Leena keeps handing me water. Ben’s been giving Theo a hard time since we got here.”

“And Mateo?”

“Downstairs. He said he’d wake me for dinner if I fell asleep.”

She let out a slow breath.

“Good.”

Julian looked at the other bed, the sweatshirt hanging from Mateo’s desk chair. When he had first arrived, everything on that side of the room had belonged to a stranger. He used to be conscious of the space between their belongings, careful where he left things, aware of every sound he made when Mateo was trying to sleep. Now there was a water bottle on the floor between the beds, and he would have had to inspect it to know whose it was.

“I wish you were here,” he said.

“I know, mijo.”

For a little while neither of them spoke. His mother looked tired in a way the screen made difficult to judge, softening some shadows and deepening others. He wanted to ask her to keep the call open while he lay down. The thought made him feel younger than he had felt in days, and he stayed sitting on the edge of the mattress.

“They take care of me,” he said.

His mother was quiet for a moment.

“Then you let them.”

***

The meeting took place in a room too small for a ceremony.

Halvorsen sat at the end of the table with Patel to her left and Morse near the window. Water glasses had been set at each chair. Julian chose one beside Aisha and eased himself into it, newly conscious of the places where his muscles hurt now that he had been still. Patel watched them enter. He wondered whether she could tell who had slept in the vehicle and who had merely closed their eyes.

“Thirty minutes,” she said before everyone sat down. “Then they’re finished for today.”

Morse nodded.

“Agreed.”

He waited until the chairs stopped moving.

“Farrell sent an operational summary,” he said. “It’s incomplete. I suspect the eventual version will be incomplete in more interesting ways.”

Theo looked up.

Morse’s attention moved among them.

“You solved problems together that our models continued treating as separate. Then you recognized that solving each new problem yourselves would leave the larger vulnerability intact.”

“We recognized it after it started winning,” Mateo said.

“Yes,” Morse said. “That is often when recognition becomes useful.”

There was no reprimand in it. He leaned forward slightly.

“What interests me most is that your final approach enabled people without your augmented capabilities to succeed. You made something they could use without you.”

“Some of them corrected what we made,” Leena said.

“I would hope so. They knew their systems.”

Julian glanced at her. She had been prepared to defend that part. Morse had left her nothing to defend.

Halvorsen opened the folder in front of her.

“We need to understand the parallel processing. When it began, what it required, whether any of you experienced gaps or difficulty disengaging.”

“Not today,” Patel said.

“I mean in the coming days.”

Kael’s gaze remained on his untouched water. Julian had almost forgotten how close they had all been inside the work, how little distance there had seemed to be between a problem forming in one mind and an answer arriving from another. Around this table, he could hear Kael’s sleeve move against the wood and still have no idea what he was thinking.

Morse folded his hands.

“There is also a question we can’t postpone indefinitely. We now know this capability exists. Another emergency will come.”

Theo leaned back.

“There it is.”

“Theo,” Halvorsen said.

“No,” Morse said. “He’s right to hear the implication.”

The room settled.

“I think we should consider a standing response capability,” Morse continued. “With proper support, trained regional counterparts, and additional cohorts prepared to contribute. What happened at CISA depended on finding students scattered across a national emergency and bringing them together after people had already been hurt. We should be able to do better.”

Julian felt the force of it before he began searching for its weaknesses. A vehicle that arrived sooner. A road kept open. His mother’s phone ringing while it still had a signal. He could remember exactly how long he had waited for some of those things, and the possibility of shortening that wait for someone else made the proposal feel almost familiar, as though he had already agreed to part of it.

Leena was looking directly at Morse.

“Only for emergencies?”

“Initially, that would be the clearest purpose.”

“Medical ones?”

“Potentially. With appropriate clinical expertise.”

“The expertise exists,” she said. “Access doesn’t always.”

“No,” Morse said. “It doesn’t.”

Patel placed her pen on the table.

“Before we discuss commitments, they need recovery time. Private assessments. An opportunity to understand what this experience has done to them without being asked to turn it into a service.”

“I’m proposing that we explore it,” Morse said.

“Exploration can acquire expectations very quickly.”

Morse accepted that with a slight inclination of his head. Aisha had been rubbing one thumb against the side of her glass.

“If someone calls,” she said, “and tells us people will die unless we come, what would you count as a choice?”

No one answered immediately.

Morse looked at her without softening his attention.

“I wouldn’t pretend that was an easy choice.”

“That wasn’t what I asked.”

“No,” he said. “It wasn’t.”

Julian looked at the table.

“I’d want them to call.”

Aisha turned toward him, and he made himself continue.

“If they needed us. If something like this happened again. I’d want to know.”

“Knowing isn’t the same as agreeing.”

“I know.”

But he could feel how quickly one would become the other inside him. His mother had asked him to let his friends take care of him, and he had meant to try. He could still feel the weight of the clean shirt on his shoulders, still remember Ethan taking his bag. Yet someone only had to describe another road closing, another ambulance waiting, and he was already imagining leaving.

Aisha watched him for a moment longer. He wished he had something to add that would make her less concerned. He wished, too, that she had not heard the part he had left unsaid quite so clearly.

Mateo shifted his glass a few centimeters, aligning it with nothing Julian could see.

“If we build a response group,” he said, “people will make plans around it. They’ll start assuming it’s available. That changes what they maintain for themselves.”

“Which is why the design matters,” Morse said.

“So does what happens when we say no.”

“Yes.”

Theo had been staring at the folder in front of Halvorsen.

“What did you already know?”

Halvorsen looked up.

“About the synchronization,” he said. “Before Farrell brought us in.”

“We had evidence of increasing coordination. We did not have an adequate model of…”

“Nineteen weeks.”

Morse had not raised his voice.

Halvorsen stopped.

“That is when it entered the projections,” Morse said. “Not as a finding. As a possibility we could no longer exclude.”

He had not opened the folder.

“We called it collective coherence.”

“Did you think it would happen?” Theo asked.

“I modeled it as possible, but dependent on conditions beyond those we expected you to experience. Sustained duress. Shared context. Consequences you cared about more than your own performance.”

“Then why didn’t you tell us it was possible?”

“Because telling you would have been an intervention.”

Patel’s pen stopped.

“A cohort told to expect coherence will try to produce it,” Morse said.

“So you waited.”

“I documented.” He turned his hands over on the table. “Those are different responsibilities, though I understand why the distinction offers you very little.”

Theo’s eyes moved to Kael.

Morse noticed the movement. Julian saw him notice. It told him nothing about what Morse made of it.

“We should show you the relevant work,” Morse said. “And you should tell us where it fails.”

Julian tried to locate what still bothered him. He could follow the explanation. He had watched Theo reach for a possibility the moment someone named it; he knew they would have tried to produce coherence if they had been told it might happen. Yet nineteen weeks was long enough to contain ordinary mornings he barely remembered, meals and arguments and exercises during which somebody else had been considering what they might become under enough pressure.

He looked at the closed folder. Part of him wanted it opened immediately.

That, too, was difficult to sort out. Morse was offering them a chance to see what the adults had been looking at while the students lived inside the measurements. Julian wanted the access even while he wondered how much of what mattered would be waiting on those pages.

Patel glanced at the clock.

“That’s enough for today.”

Halvorsen closed the folder, and Morse stood with them.

“Whatever comes next,” he said, “what you accomplished belongs to you. Take some time before deciding what you want to do with it.”

Julian believed he meant it. As they moved into the corridor, Theo was already asking Leena what she thought the models would contain. Mateo walked beside them without speaking, listening closely enough that Julian knew he was considering it too.

Aisha touched Julian’s arm to let someone pass between them. He stepped aside, then fell into place beside her. They were going back to the residence. Dinner would be there later, and Mateo had promised to wake him if he slept.

For the length of the corridor, he tried to let those be the things that came next.

Theo waited until they reached the residence before speaking to Kael.

“Still have it?”

Kael looked at him. Theo did not need to specify which file.

“Yes.”

They stood outside the common room. Inside, Ben was arguing that a person could be too tired to sleep and that this was a design failure someone should address. A chair scraped. Leena laughed once, unexpectedly, and then again at whatever someone said in response. Theo had been intending to go in and sit somewhere he would not be expected to move for a while. He could hear someone shifting the chairs to make room.

He leaned against the wall.

“I don’t want it sitting between us forever.”

Kael’s expression changed so slightly that Theo might have missed it if he had looked toward the doorway.

“The file?”

“The part where we know it’s there and keep doing everything else.”

From the common room came the rattle of a spoon dropped into a cup. Kael looked toward the sound, his thumb resting along the spine of his journal.

For weeks, Theo had known where both copies of the log were stored. He had checked them, thought about them at inconvenient times, and found reasons to wait until he understood more. A change without an attributed source. A timestamp. Eleven minutes between an adjustment they had not authorized and the change they had noticed in Kael during the exercise. He could preserve those facts exactly. He had done much less well with the question of what to do about them.

During the emergency, there had been no time. That had been true, and it had also been a relief.

Now people wanted to build something around what had happened.

“Patel?” he asked.

Kael rubbed his thumb along the journal’s spine.

“If we give it to her, it becomes a thing people discuss.”

“It already is.”

“Two people.”

Theo nodded. He could imagine the file opened on a larger display, the timestamp underlined, people talking about Kael while Kael waited somewhere else. He had been so occupied with finding someone who could explain the entry that he had barely considered what the explanation might require of the person beside him.

He let Kael look down the corridor. Inside the common room, Ben began his argument again for someone who had arrived too late to hear it. There was time to wait through a silence.

“I want to be there,” Kael said.

“For what?”

“When they discuss it.”

“Okay.”

“And I want to know who sees it.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t say okay if you mean you’ll ask and hope.”

Theo straightened.

“I mean we tell her that before we give her anything.”

Kael studied him. Theo resisted the urge to add another assurance, or to explain how they could manage the permissions on the file. Kael had asked for something beyond control of the copies, and Theo needed to know whether he was prepared to stand beside him and keep asking for it.

After a while, Kael nodded.

They walked back through the residence together. The sounds from the common room followed them as far as the turn, then faded beneath the soft noise of the building. Theo kept his pace beside Kael’s. Twice he began arranging what he would say to Patel, and twice he left the wording unfinished.

Patel was still in her office. A lamp illuminated one end of her desk, leaving the window behind it dark with reflected room. Her coat hung over the back of a chair. When she opened the door, her gaze moved from Theo to Kael and stayed there long enough to make clear that she understood this was not a casual visit.

“Come in.”

“We need to show you something,” Theo said.

She stepped aside.

Kael chose the chair nearest the door, and Theo sat beside him. Before opening the file, Theo told her their conditions. It took longer spoken aloud than it had in the corridor. He found himself checking Kael’s face as he explained, making sure that nothing had become smaller or easier in the telling.

Patel listened without reaching for her pen.

“I can tell you who I would initially need to consult,” she said. “If it indicates an immediate safety issue, I may need to act before we can discuss every step. I won’t promise otherwise.”

Kael’s hand tightened around the journal.

“But you’d tell me.”

“Yes.”

“Before, when you can.”

“Yes.”

Theo waited until Kael nodded before opening the log on the display between them.

For a few seconds, Patel did not move. Then she leaned closer, her attention settling on the entry Theo had examined so often that he knew how it would look before it appeared. He watched her read past it, return, and read the surrounding lines again.

“Which session?”

Theo told her.

“And you preserved the original export?”

“Two copies. Separate locations.”

“Who else has seen this?”

“No one.”

She read it again. Kael watched her face, his journal held across his knees. Theo had brought the file here hoping that someone else would know what it meant. As Patel continued reading, he became aware of how badly he wanted her expression to change in a way he could understand.

She indicated the time.

“This adjustment occurred before the change you noticed during the exercise?”

“Eleven minutes,” Theo said.

Her gaze shifted to Kael.

“Does that match your recollection?”

“I remember the exercise.”

He waited, and she gave him room to continue.

“I don’t remember agreeing to that.”

Patel looked once more at the entry. Theo listened for the reassurance that might make this a mistake they could go upstairs and forget, or the question that would make him wish he had brought it sooner. She took enough time that he felt both possibilities pass through him.

“Then we need to establish what it affected,” she said.

The office was quiet enough for Theo to hear the ventilation change somewhere above the ceiling. Beyond the door, footsteps passed and continued down the corridor. Patel turned the display slightly so Kael could see it without leaning toward her, then moved her hand away from it.

“What do you want me to do with this?”

Theo looked at Kael and waited.

“Find out what happened,” Kael said.