Dara Osei was not in Vau.
He was four kilometers west of Vau, at a point where the road had completely given way to a ravine and where someone had built, in response, a bridge.
Not a large bridge.
Not a bridge of civil engineering with structural calculations and certified materials.
A bridge that had begun as an emergency crossing and had been improved iteratively.
Morgan could see the layers of improvement in the structure, each addition different from the last in material and technique, the history of a mind that had returned repeatedly to the same problem and each time found a better solution.
Dara Osei was underneath the bridge.
Checking something in the lower structure with a flashlight in hand and the specific expression of someone not inspecting out of obligation but compulsion.
The engineer who cannot stop seeing what might fail, even when it is not his problem, even when nobody asked him, even when there are more urgent things available to worry about.
He was thirty-four years old and had the body of someone who had built physical endurance over time not through deliberate exercise but through the labor of constructing things with his own hands.
Tall.
Large hands with the specific marks of precision work, not the thick hands of brute labor, but hands that had learned to apply force exactly where necessary and nowhere else.
The Hunter stopped at the northern edge of the bridge.
“Dara.”
The man beneath the bridge did not move immediately.
He continued examining whatever he was examining, a specific joint in the structure, Morgan could not see from where he stood, with the flashlight.
“Hunter,” he said without looking up.
The tone of someone who recognizes who arrived but is finishing what he was doing before giving attention.
“The southeast joint is carrying load incorrectly.
Someone installed the reinforcement at the wrong angle.
It’ll fail in two months if nobody fixes it.”
“Didn’t you say the same thing the last time you came through here?” said the Hunter.
“Last time I said it would fail in three months.
That was a month ago.
The calculation is correct.”
Dara crawled out from beneath the bridge, put away the flashlight, looked at the Hunter and then at Morgan, Elisa, and Sung Woo with the rapid inventory gaze of someone accustomed to assessing groups.
“There are more of you than last time.”
“There are.” Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
“You came to ask me again.”
“Yes.”
Dara Osei fell silent.
He looked at the bridge, not with the look of someone avoiding the conversation, but with the look of someone genuinely thinking about two things at once and giving each the weight it deserved.
“Last time I said no because there wasn’t enough reason,” he said, turning toward the Hunter.
“The time before that I said no because there was no reason at all.” A pause.
“What changed?”
“Crest.”
Dara knew Crest.
That was visible in the way the name arrived, not as new information but as a coordinate on a map that already existed.
Crest had been, two years earlier, one of the settlements he had remotely consulted regarding reinforcement structures.
He had communicated with someone there, with the engineer named Petrov, who had measured distances and published data Dara had read and commented on through a network that no longer existed.
“What happened to Crest?” he asked, with a quality in his voice that was not visible emotion but the place where emotion exists privately.
The Hunter explained.
Briefly.
Factually.
With the precision of someone who respects the listener enough not to manipulate through narrative but to inform through facts.
When he finished, Dara remained silent for a moment Morgan recognized as the silence of someone doing an equation.
Not a personal cost-benefit equation, but a structural one.
Like an engineer calculating loads.
“Petrov,” he said.
“He’s in the liminal space with the other forty,” Morgan replied.
Dara looked at him.
It was the first time his eyes truly settled on Morgan, not the quick inventory of arrival, but the full attention of someone who had found the relevant point.
“You’re from Crest.”
“I am.”
“Petrov Junior.
The son.”
“I was ten when Crest disappeared.”
Dara fell silent. Find the original chapter at g.com.
Morgan knew that silence from a different angle than he knew the others.
It was the silence of someone who had decided not to care about anything enough for loss to hurt, and who had found in that refusal to care the specific peace of someone who built a wall high enough not to see what was on the other side.
But walls do not eliminate what is beyond them.
They only delay the moment when the weight beyond becomes greater than the wall itself.
The name Petrov Junior had been that moment.
“We have less than a week,” Morgan said.
“Possibly less.
To find the liminal space, create a controlled access point, and get forty-one people out.” A pause.
“The Hunter says you’re the only person he knows with the technical knowledge to evaluate the structure of a liminal space and determine where it can be opened without total collapse.”
Dara looked at the Hunter.
“You said that?”
“In different words,” said the Hunter.
“What words?”
“I said that without you we’d probably kill everyone we were trying to save.”
Dara made what was the minimum equivalent of an ironic expression, not a smile, only the facial acknowledgment that there was something absurd about the situation deserving recognition.
“At least it’s honest.” He looked at the bridge one last time.
“The southeast joint.
Someone has to fix it.”
“There are people in Vau who can do it with the right instructions,” said the Hunter.
“Written instructions or verbal?”
“Whichever you prefer.”
Dara stood still a moment longer.
The kind of pause that exists immediately before a decision a person already knows they are going to make but wants the act of making it to be deliberate rather than reactive.
Because decisions made deliberately possess a kind of dignity reactive decisions do not, and Dara Osei, in everything else he had let go of, had kept that.
“Written instructions,” he said.
“Twenty minutes.”
He pulled a notebook from his pocket.
And began to write.