The meeting happened early in the morning, before Bó was fully awake.
It wasn’t formally called—there wasn’t a sufficiently established structure in Bó for formal summons, and Ruth had learned that explicitly summoning people created resistance that invitation did not.
So she had simply placed bread and hot water on the table in her room, and the seven had appeared, because bread and hot water were, in the post–Day 0 world, the functional equivalent of any meeting symbol the previous world had ever developed.
Dara arrived first.
She sat without eating, elbows on the table, eyes fixed on the wall where Ruth had pinned the map of Crest beside three other maps that together formed the cartography of the territory between Bó and the point where Crest had been.
Sung Woo arrived next, looking like someone who had slept more than expected and was slightly surprised by it—as if the body had made an independent decision to rest now because it had calculated that future opportunities would be scarce.
Elisa entered with Eliot, which Morgan noted without commenting—the boy had clearly woken early and had gone to knock on Elisa’s door before anyone else, which said something about how Eliot had catalogued available people and determined which one would be most awake before dawn.
The Hunter was already there when Morgan entered.
Naturally.
He had probably been there before everyone else, even before Ruth, drinking hot water and studying the map with the attention of someone who had already made all relevant decisions and was only confirming details.
“Three days,” Ruth said without preamble once everyone was inside.
“That’s the maximum the liminal space of Crest has before full integration with the other side.
Possibly less.
The margin of error is twelve hours in either direction, which means it could be two and a half days, it could be three and a half.”
“How long does it take to reach Crest’s point?” Dara asked.
“Two days,” said the Hunter.
“If there are no complications.”
The silence that followed had the quality of everyone processing the math and reaching the same conclusion simultaneously.
“So we leave today,” Morgan said.
It wasn’t a question.
It was the obvious conclusion from available data, spoken aloud because someone had to say it, and because Morgan had spent the night preparing himself to be the one who said it.
No one disagreed.
Ruth continued:
The liminal space—according to what I compiled from the three previous cases and what the text describes—is not accessible by direct physical means.
There is no entrance that can be forced with conventional tools.” She looked at the group with the directness of someone who prefers to say the hard thing once and clearly rather than let it be discovered at the worst possible moment.
“To create controlled access, someone with permeability to the liminal space is required to act as… as an entry point.
As the one who opens the door from the inside.”
Silence.
“Eliot,” Morgan said.
The word came out before he could filter what it contained.
“Eliot,” Ruth confirmed, with an unusual gentleness that therefore carried more weight.
“The text is specific about the permeable child.
And the Hunter’s notes confirm the pattern.
He has the right frequency for—”
“No.” Morgan’s voice was cold.
The voice from beneath the layers.
“No.”
“Morgan,” said the Hunter.
“He’s nine years old.”
“I know how old I am,” Eliot said, from the chair where he sat with untouched bread and his gaze already positioned in the conversation with the attention of someone who had been waiting for it to reach this point.
“And I know what it means to be permeable.
Ruth explained it to me yesterday.”
Morgan turned to his brother.
“Ruth shouldn’t have—”
“I asked.” The boy looked at him with that firmness that required visible effort, the same firmness Eliot had carried since he was small enough for Clare to say he was born with more conviction than his body could hold. This story is hosted at g.com.
“I asked because I wanted to know.
Because knowing is better than not knowing even when what you know is difficult.” A pause.
“You said that.”
Morgan went silent.
The anger was there—cold, not explosive, the specific pressure of something that had found an obstacle it could not remove by force because the obstacle was truth, and truth does not yield to force.
“If anything happens to you,” Morgan said very quietly.
“I know,” Eliot said.
“But forty-one people.”
The room fell silent.
Sung Woo was looking at the bread in front of him.
Dara was looking at the map.
Elisa was looking at Morgan with the expression of someone who recognizes what he is feeling not through sympathy, but through recognition of the same structure within herself—the cost of caring enough for loss to become unbearable.
The Hunter said:
“He won’t be alone at any moment.” He said it to Morgan, not Eliot, because the promise was for Morgan.
“Every step, every second of the process, someone will be with him.” A pause.
“That someone is me.”
Morgan looked at the Hunter.
At Viktor, who had once been Viktor.
At a man who had built his entire existence around a system whose only function was keeping people alive, and whose pride lay exactly in the conviction that the system was sufficient—and who was now making a promise that placed himself beneath that system.
Morgan recognized the cost of that.
He closed his eyes for three seconds.
Opened them.
“We leave at noon,” he said.