# Chapter 17: The Crash

The room tilted.

Not the room. My vision. The architecture was still building but the walls of the corridor were doubling, splitting into parallel images that refused to converge. I tried to blink. Blink was a process that required — what? Muscles. Signals. Something between the instruction and the execution that had stopped working properly.

(*—the math works. Contingency: forgery detection, abort, recalibrate. Maximum three attempts. Reservoir at sixty-three percent entering the cure. Layer 2 costs twenty-two to twenty-eight. Landing at thirty-five to—*)

"Phelan." Mere's voice. The frequency was correct — I knew that frequency the way I knew the smell of old books and binding salt — but the words had stopped being words. They arrived as shapes. Warm shapes. Shapes with a specific weight that my processing allocated to a category the noise couldn't name.

(*—thirty-five to forty-one. Sufficient. Layer 1: minimal bracelet, five percent. Final: thirty to thirty-six. The chain holds. The chain—*)

The bracelet went hot.

Not warm. Not the steady ambient feeling I'd grown accustomed to over nine days. Hot. The focusing matrix was still sharpening the corridor but the reservoir was — doing something. Pushing, hard. The stone burned against the inside of my wrist and the sensation registered as the only real input in a room that had become abstraction.

(*—the chain holds the chain holds the chain—*)

Sound became texture. Leon's voice was rough wool. Devod's was sandpaper — worried sandpaper, the kind that's been rubbed too hard in one spot. Mere's was — I didn't have a material for Mere's. The noise tried to categorise it and the categorisation engine returned nothing. Just frequency. Just presence.

(*—holds the—*)

The floor rose up to meet me, or I went down to meet the floor. There was no practical difference. Something caught the side of my head before it hit wood — a hand, a sleeve, something that smelled like old paper and binding salt.

(*—the—*)

* * *

I woke up to a headache that had opinions about my continued existence.

A migraine. The kind that starts behind your eyes and works its way into the bones of your skull with the systematic thoroughness of a man dismantling a house he's been hired to demolish. Every heartbeat was a hammer strike. Every breath was a concession to biology that the migraine considered optional.

(*Inventory. Slow. Ceiling — guild planning room. Same stains. Horizontal. Floor, not chair. Blanket. Two blankets. Pillow that isn't a pillow — folded jacket.*)

I was on the floor of the guild planning room, which was both expected and humiliating in the specific way that waking up on a floor is always humiliating when you're thirty-something and theoretically capable of finding furniture. Someone had moved the chairs to the walls. Someone else — or possibly the same someone — had arranged a bedroll of blankets underneath me with the organised efficiency of a person who'd made a decision about where I was going to be and then put me there.

(*Light from the windows. Morning light. East-facing. Monday second bell was afternoon. This is — Tuesday? Tuesday morning. How long—*)

I turned my head. This was a mistake. The migraine punished the movement with a spike of pain that started at the base of my skull and ended somewhere behind my left eye, and for three full seconds I considered the possibility that lying perfectly still on this floor for the rest of my natural life was a reasonable career choice.

Something was on the floor beside me, within arm's reach.

A cup of water. A wrapped bundle of food — bread, dried meat, an apple, provisions assembled with the understanding that recovery required calories, not presentation. A folded piece of paper.

And a small ceramic bowl with ground root in it, measured to the quarter-grain, ready to steep.

I knew that grind. I knew those measurements.

Thornwell root. Ground specifically for migraine dosing — not the rough chop you'd use for general pain management, but the fine powder that dissolves faster and hits the blood quicker. The amount was precise: enough to blunt the worst of the spike without the drowsiness that comes from over-dosing. Someone had weighed this. Someone who understood dosing the way a botanist understands dosing, not the way a desperate man stealing from his employer's stock at second bell in the morning understands dosing.

(*The dog crash. Migraine at second bell. Gavren's stock — stolen, rough-ground, too much, slept until noon. She was there the next morning. She saw the state of me and she filed it. Not the emotion. The data. And the solution is sitting on the floor next to my head.*)

I reached for the water first. My hand was shaking — not the fine tremor from the Barrows, whole-arm instability — reserves somewhere below functional. Drank. Reached for the thornwell root. Added it to the water. Drank that too.

The migraine didn't vanish. Thornwell root doesn't work that way. But after two minutes the hammer strikes softened from demolition to renovation, and the light from the windows stopped feeling like a personal attack.

I unfolded the note.

Mere's handwriting. Economical, no loops, each letter formed with the minimum strokes required to be legible.

*Ned stable. Moss prepared. Leon has your diagrams. Eat something.*

Four sentences. No greeting, no sign-off, no "how are you feeling" or "you scared us" or any of the emotional scaffolding that most people would build around a note left for someone who'd collapsed in front of them and been unconscious for — I checked the light again — at least twelve hours.

(*Four sentences. Four data points. Patient status: stable. Critical supply: prepared. Technical continuity: maintained. Biological requirement: addressed. Everything I'd need to know in the order I'd need to know it. She wrote this note for the person I am, not the person most people think I should be.*)

I ate the bread. Slowly. The dried meat was tougher on my jaw than I'd have liked, but my body was making insistent arguments about caloric debt that I wasn't in a position to negotiate.

The bracelet.

I looked at my wrist. The stone was — different. Neither the warm amber-red I'd grown used to, nor the deep black of full depletion. Something between. A dark, tired colour that was slowly — visibly slowly, if I watched for thirty seconds — warming back toward amber. Faint heat against my skin. Not the burn from last night. A trickle. A recovery.

(*Wellspring. Same as the mine — reserves dropping past threshold, flow reversed. It happened again. The bracelet drained itself to keep me — what? Alive? Conscious longer than I should have been? Both? Mere's question: "What happens when it's full?" It saves for you. Repeating behaviour. Not one-time. The bracelet is running a programme older than the Compact and it's running it for me.*)

The room was quiet. Morning quiet — the kind that means people have been here recently and left things in a specific order because they'll be back. Leon's jacket on a chair. A cup with tea residue by the window. The chalk on the table was different from yesterday — someone had been writing.

I sat up. Slowly. The migraine voiced its objections and the thornwell root replied on my behalf, and between the two of them I achieved vertical without losing consciousness, which felt like a significant accomplishment that no one was present to appreciate.

Leon's diagrams.

They were spread across the table in three clean sheets — not the frantic chalk notation from yesterday's spiral, but organised transcription. Ink on paper. The three-layer architecture laid out with Leon's particular brand of aggressive clarity: nested circles for the layers, branching notation for the exploit sequences, timing annotations in the margins. My spiral, captured. The chain architecture, preserved.

He'd drawn it while I was building it. I'd been inside the corridor and he'd been standing outside writing down what the corridor looked like.

The door opened.

Leon came in carrying two cups and looking like a man who'd slept in a chair and had strong feelings about it.

"You look terrible," he said. He set one cup on the table and kept the other. "Fourteen hours. That's a record, even for you."

"The Barrows crash was longer."

"The Barrows crash was after a death ward. You cracked a death ward and fought crawlers and walked home. This time you sat in a chair and thought too hard." He pulled out a seat and sat with the careful movements of a man whose back had spent the night disagreeing with guild furniture. "It's worse, Phelan. You know it's worse."

(*He's right. The dog crash — overnight, manageable, functional by morning. The Barrows — longer, deeper, but that was physical too. Combat, crawlers, a death ward, walking home on empty. The body had reasons to shut down. This is different. I sat in a chair and the bracelet let me think past the limit. The focusing matrix kept sharpening the image after my body was already shutting down. Like giving a man drowning a longer rope — he can reach further, but the water's still the same depth.*)

"The diagrams," I said.

Leon's expression shifted. Not softer — Leon didn't do softer. Acknowledgment. "You were building something. I wrote it down."

"All of it?"

"All of it. The execution order, the timing windows, the contingency branches. You were talking — some of it. Muttering. The noise was leaking." He gestured at the papers. "The chain holds. I checked the math while you were being unconscious. Layer 3, Layer 2, Layer 1. The order's clean."

I looked at the diagrams again. The notation was Leon's but the architecture was mine, and seeing it transcribed — frozen, stable, held by someone else's hand — was a specific kind of strange I didn't have a word for. The corridor I'd been building in my head was real. It existed outside of me now.

"Anything happened with the Compact?"

Leon set down his tea. His jaw tightened. The flat, factual face he wore when he was about to deliver information he'd already processed and filed under *problems that need addressing*.

"Ledger came by. Last night, around tenth bell — four hours after you went down." He counted the items on his fingers. "One: formal motion from the Compact to transfer Ned Floundry to their medical supervision. 'For his own safety.' Guild blocked it. Ledger said it wasn't even close — guild charter gives the contracted practitioner primacy during an active engagement, and your engagement contract is clean."

"Two?"

"Inquiry into your qualifications. Filed with the guild's oversight liaison. Method review, competency standards, right to work a curse case without Compact certification." Leon's mouth thinned. "It's nuisance paperwork. Standard harassment toolkit — file enough inquiries and even a clean practitioner spends more time answering questions than working. But it's filed, which means it's on record, which means it doesn't go away by itself."

(*Harassment toolkit. They're not trying to prove I'm unqualified — they're trying to make the paperwork cost more than the case is worth. Standard bureaucratic attrition. The same approach works on everything from guild permits to shipping inspections. Ned would have recognised it. Ned probably did recognise it, before they took his voice.*)

"And three?"

Leon paused. The pause was deliberate — Leon didn't do unnecessary pauses any more than Leon did softness. "They went to the family."

The bread in my stomach went cold.

"A Compact representative visited the Floundry home yesterday evening. Ledger got wind of it through guild intelligence — someone at the Compact's local office has been talking to someone at the guild, or Ledger has sources he didn't volunteer. Either way: the representative sat in Calla Floundry's kitchen and offered the Compact's full resources. Sanctioned practitioners. Proper facilities. Established methods." Leon's voice was carefully neutral. "They targeted the fear. Her husband is dying and she's trusting an unvetted practitioner outside the Compact's oversight, working for a guild that doesn't play by gentlemen's rules."

(*Calla. The organised documents. The composed face over the breaking composure. "He had beautiful handwriting." She's been holding herself together with structure and faith that someone, anyone, would come through — and now the people who classified her husband's curse as unbreakable in eleven days are sitting in her kitchen telling her they can help. Sanctioned. Certified. Respectable. Everything the Guild of Necessary Services isn't, by design. The same people who wrote the assessment parameters before the assessment began. The same people who sent curse-breakers working within predetermined constraints.*)

"Did she—"

"She held. But it shook her." Leon met my eyes. "Ledger's there now. Went this morning, first thing. Not to promise the cure works — he doesn't know the details and he wouldn't lie about it. But the Compact classified the curse as unbreakable. Their words, their assessment, eleven days. So what exactly are they offering that they didn't offer when they had custody of the case? Ledger's reframing it. Steadying her."

"How shaken?"

"Shaken enough that Ledger went in person instead of sending a message."

I stared at the ceiling for a moment. The thornwell root was doing its work — the migraine had receded from active demolition to a dull, persistent ache that I could think through, if I thought carefully. Faster than last time, too. My rough-ground stolen dose had taken twenty minutes to cut through and knocked me out until noon. Mere's precise little quarter-grain measure had done the job in two and left me functional. There was probably a lesson in there about asking for help instead of stealing it, but I wasn't in the mood for personal growth.

(*Ticking clocks. Ned's body — days, not weeks. The moss preparation — hours remaining. And now Calla's confidence — not broken, but cracked. Ledger can steady it but he can't seal it. Every day I'm not actively working the case is a day the Compact's doubt grows roots. They don't need to win the argument. They just need Calla to hesitate long enough.*)

"The moss," I said. "Mere's note said it's prepared."

"Standard concentration — the Layer 1 dampening. She's been working since midnight, roughly. Started here, moved to Thresholds when she needed her workspace. The altered preparation for Layer 3 is running but she said—" Leon checked a note on the edge of one of his diagram pages. Mere's handwriting, tight and precise in the margin. "She said the altered concentration needs the resonance data from one more bedside observation. The anchor's recalibration characteristics. Without those, she can calculate the band but not the precision."

"How long for the altered prep once she has the data?"

"An hour, maybe two, once she has the numbers. The base preparation is done — she just needs to adjust the final concentration to match the anchor's frequency. But the observation and the data have to happen first."

I looked at the bracelet. The stone was still that tired, warming colour. If I needed bracelet-enhanced precision for the bedside observation — and I did — the reservoir needed to recover. How far, and how fast, depended on questions about the wellspring that I still couldn't fully answer.

"Mere noticed the stone," Leon said, following my gaze. "The colour change. She said it matches something from her study — the conditional behaviour. The bracelet was darker after you crashed. She's been watching it warm back up." He paused. "She said to tell you it's been recovering faster than your reserves. The bracelet is ahead of you."

(*The bracelet is ahead of me. The wellspring emptied itself to keep me going and now it's recharging faster than I am. Pre-Compact engineering, running its programme, saving for me. Mere saw the pattern because Mere sees patterns. She identified the conditional logic weeks ago — if reserves drop below threshold, then reverse flow. She watched it happen in real time while I was unconscious and she's already drawn conclusions I haven't caught up to yet.*)

"Where is she?"

"Thresholds. Back room. She left about an hour ago — said the preparation needs monitoring at specific intervals. She'll be back." Something crossed Leon's face that he didn't bother naming. "Devod's been running between here and there. Carrying things. He doesn't know what half of it is, but he carries it carefully."

I looked around the room again with eyes that were starting to process properly. The chairs pushed to the walls. The blanket arrangement — not thrown, placed. The pillow that was a folded jacket. My right hand, resting on my chest, was positioned palm-up, fingers slightly curled. That wasn't how I fall. When I go down, my hands close — defensive reflex, fingers in, protecting the joints. Someone had moved my hand. Opened it. Held it, maybe, and then placed it back in a position that was comfortable rather than defensive.

The blanket on my left side was tucked. Not pulled — tucked. The specific, deliberate fold of someone who'd decided I should be warm and executed the decision with more precision than warmth usually requires.

(*Someone sat with me. Someone held my hand while I was unconscious and tucked blankets around me and — what? Smoothed my hair? Checked my breathing? Did the things that people do when someone they care about is hurt and can't respond and there's nothing left to *do* except be present? Someone who wouldn't have done any of those things if I'd been conscious. If I could have seen. If there was a social performance required.*)

Devod came in through the door carrying a canvas bag. He stopped when he saw me sitting up.

"Oh, thank the—" He caught himself. Adjusted. Put the bag on the table with the care of a man handling someone else's important things. "You're up. Good. That's good."

"How long have you been here?"

"Since yesterday. Leon told me when to check, when to leave you alone. Mere told me what to carry." He was listing contributions like a man filing a report: tasks performed, nothing extra claimed. "Carter dropped off more supplies last night — food, water, medical kit refill. He said to tell you the bracelet's inscription work is—" Devod frowned. "Something about harmonic settling? I wrote it down." He produced a scrap of paper from his pocket with Carter's message in Devod's handwriting, the technical terms preserved phonetically.

I took the scrap. Carter's observation was about the bracelet's post-stress harmonic — settling patterns after heavy use.

(*Right. Hard to keep a focusing matrix hidden from a craftsman when you're unconscious on his floor with your sleeve riding up. Carter would've spotted the inscription work in about four seconds. Probably had opinions about it before I stopped twitching.*)

Filed it. Looked at Devod.

His gaze moved — blankets, Mere's note, the food arranged on the floor — and then settled on a point in the middle distance that wasn't in the room at all.

"She stayed," Devod said. Quiet. Not to me — to the room, or to himself, or to twelve years of distance and a lie he didn't know how to unmake. "After everyone else went home for a few hours. She stayed."

His face was — I'd seen Devod worried, confused, enthusiastic, stubborn, and briefly terrified in a mine shaft. I hadn't seen this. It was the face of a father who'd watched his daughter do something he'd never expected to see, and the thing she'd done wasn't a skill or a competence or an idea. It was tenderness. The kind she didn't perform. The kind that existed only when there was no one to perform it for.

(*He came back from an errand. Walked in. Saw her. Saw her with me — holding my hand, maybe. Smoothing hair. Being gentle in the way she would never allow if I could see it, if there was a response expected, if the social contract was active. He saw his daughter love someone and he backed out of the room and he's carrying it now the way he carries everything about Mere — carefully, silently, with twelve years of guilt and pride and distance compressed into an expression that he thinks he's hiding.*)

(*He's not hiding it.*)

I didn't say anything. Some things aren't mine to name.

Devod blinked. Came back. "She also said — and I'm quoting because she was very specific — 'Tell him the standard preparation is on schedule. The altered concentration requires his data. He should eat before he tries to think.'"

"She said that last part?"

"She was very specific about the eating."

I drank the rest of the water. Morning light had shifted across the floorboards while we talked — brighter now, the east windows losing their advantage to the climbing sun. My hands were steadier than they'd been ten minutes ago. The thornwell root, the bread, the water — small repairs, adding up. Not ready. But closer.

The door opened and Mere walked in carrying a leather satchel and wearing the expression of a woman who had been working for fourteen hours and considered this a normal Tuesday.

She looked at me. Her eyes did the scan — the systematic assessment that started at the top and worked down, cataloguing data points the way other people catalogue emotions. Skin colour. Eye clarity. Posture. Tremor. The cup of water, half-empty. The thornwell root bowl, used. The bread, mostly eaten.

"You used the root," she said.

"You prepared it."

"You stole some of Gavren's stock after the dog. Your dosage was wrong — you slept through the morning. I fixed that."

(*She'd bypassed the theft, the guilt, the moral dimension — filed straight to the practical failure. I took too much because my hands were shaking and I ground it rough and I overslept and she filed that under 'inefficiency' and corrected it. Quarter-grain measure. Fine grind. Precise.*)

"This time was better," I said.

"I measured it."

She set the satchel on the table and began unpacking — glass jars, sealed, each labelled in her handwriting. The moss preparations. Standard concentration in one set, the in-progress altered preparation materials in another. She moved economically — fourteen hours of repetition had made the unpacking sequence muscle memory.

"The standard preparation is complete," she said. "Dampening field strength consistent with the Layer 1 requirements from your architecture. I tested the suppression threshold against three control samples." She placed the jars in a specific order. "The altered concentration for Layer 3 is at seventy percent. I need the anchor's resonance characteristics — recalibration speed, grip tolerance, the bond weakness threshold. Without those numbers, I'm estimating the suppression band, and an estimate isn't sufficient for a preparation that has to target a specific frequency."

"You started the altered concentration without the resonance data."

She looked at me. "The preparation base is the same for the first twelve hours regardless of target frequency. I started what I could start. The concentration adjustment happens in the final stage."

(*She started what she could start. While I was unconscious on the floor of a guild room, she walked to Thresholds and began preparing a living botanical extraction at altered concentration for a curse layer whose resonance characteristics she didn't have yet, because the twelve-hour preparation window was the constraint and she could run the first seventy percent without the final variable. She didn't wait for me to wake up and give her the data. She calculated what she could do without it and she did that, and when I wake up the preparation is seventy percent complete instead of zero percent complete, and that's eight hours I didn't lose.*)

The noise went quiet.

Not the gradual fade of exhaustion or the slow dimming of a system powering down. Just — quiet. The way it went quiet when she kissed my cheek outside Thresholds. The way it went quiet when she said "You're my partner" across a counter with a pre-Compact bracelet between us.

The silence wasn't empty. It was full of something the noise couldn't categorise. Something that sat in the space between *she measured the thornwell root* and *she started the preparation without the data* and *someone held my hand while I was unconscious* and refused to be reduced to a data point or a pattern or a system I could analyse.

I looked at her. She was arranging jars.

"How did you know about the thornwell root?" I asked. The question was wrong — she'd already told me. But the question wasn't about the root. We both knew that.

"I watched you after the dog," she said. "You were shaking. The migraine was visible. The next day there was a gap in Gavren's stock that matched the dosage profile for thornwell root and you looked like you'd slept through an alarm." She placed the last jar. "Pattern recognition isn't complicated."

"No," I said. "It isn't."

Something passed between us that wasn't in the words. It was in the pause before I'd asked — the half-second where I'd looked at the thornwell root bowl and the folded blankets and the note and all the evidence of someone who'd anticipated every need I would have had upon waking and addressed them with the systematic precision of an engineer solving a problem, except the problem was me, and the solution was care, and care was a word neither of us would use because the word was too small and too imprecise for what it actually meant.

Mere turned back to the jars. Devod was looking at the wall. Leon was studying his tea.

The noise stayed quiet.

* * *

An hour later, the thornwell root had beaten the migraine into a manageable hum and I'd eaten the apple and most of the dried meat and my reserves had climbed from whatever catastrophic number they'd bottomed out at to something I estimated at thirty percent. Low. Functional. The bracelet was still warming — the stone had shifted another shade toward amber in the time I'd been awake, the wellspring doing its patient work.

The room had settled into something that resembled a functional operation. Leon at the table with the diagrams, adding annotations from overnight observations. Mere checking the altered preparation's progress against a pocket watch and a temperature chart she'd built from scratch. Devod sitting in a corner chair, not because he'd been told to sit there but because he'd identified the position in the room where he was available without being in the way — a skill honed by decades of knowing when to be present and when to be furniture.

"Timeline," I said.

Leon looked up. "Ned's condition was stable as of last night — Devod checked with Calla before Ledger arrived. But stable is relative. The degradation is still running. Every hour is an hour closer to the next symptom cascade."

"How much time did I lose?"

"Fourteen hours. Plus however long it takes you to recover enough for the bedside observation."

"The bracelet's reservoir is ahead of my reserves," Mere said, not looking up from her chart. "Based on the colour progression, I estimate the reservoir will be at operational threshold within two to three hours. Your reserves will take longer."

"I don't need full reserves for an observation."

"You need enough to sustain that thing you do — the seeing — for an hour with the bracelet active. Without crashing again." She looked up. The flat attention. The assessment that wasn't judgment. "You crashed because the bracelet let you exceed your physical capacity. The focusing matrix doesn't know when to stop. You have to."

(*She's right. The bracelet kept sharpening the corridor after my body was already failing. It's a tool that doesn't have a safety mechanism for the user — or if it does, I haven't found it yet. Pre-Compact engineering, built for practitioners who might have had different limits. Or built by someone who assumed the user would know their own. I didn't.*)

"Tomorrow morning," I said. "Bedside observation. One hour. Bracelet-enhanced, minimal reserves expenditure — I'm mapping the anchor's resonance, not analysing the full architecture. The focusing matrix does the heavy lifting. I provide the eyes."

"That gives me the remaining preparation time after you deliver the data," Mere said. "Plenty of time for the final concentration adjustment."

"Ned's timeline?"

Leon checked his notes. "Calla reported the last symptom cascade was four days ago — motor control degradation, left hand. The intervals have been shortening. If the pattern holds, the next one hits within two to three days."

(*Two to three days. Tomorrow morning for the observation. An hour or two for Mere's final adjustment after I deliver the data. The cure itself: thirty to sixty minutes if everything goes to plan. That's tight. One day of margin, maybe two. Ned's had this curse for months now — the case brief said four to six weeks remaining, and that was a week ago. If anything goes wrong — if the resonance data is harder to map than expected, if the altered preparation needs adjustment, if my reserves don't recover enough — the margin disappears.*)

(*Almost ready. Everything is almost ready. "Almost" with a dying man is a dangerous word.*)

"The Compact's inquiry," I said. "How fast does that move?"

"Slowly, if Ledger manages it," Leon said. "But it's on record. They can't un-file it. And the Calla approach — that's the one that matters. Ledger can steady her today. But if we're not at Ned's bedside within forty-eight hours with something that looks like progress, the doubt grows roots."

I sat with that for a moment. The planning room was quiet. Morning light came through the east windows and made the chalk dust on the table glow faintly, and Leon's diagrams sat in the centre like a map to somewhere we hadn't been yet, and Mere's jars were lined up in their precise order, and Devod was in his corner being available, and somewhere across the city Ledger was sitting in Calla Floundry's kitchen telling her that the people who said her husband couldn't be saved were the same people who'd made sure of it.

The world hadn't ended while I was on the floor.

People I'd chosen — or who'd chosen me, or who'd arrived through some combination of case logistics and personal stubbornness that I couldn't have engineered and wouldn't have thought to try — had carried the work forward. Leon held the technical thread. Mere advanced the preparation. Devod stayed. Carter resupplied. Ledger defended. And I had been unconscious on a guild room floor with a blanket tucked around me and a hand I didn't remember holding mine, and the chain hadn't broken.

(*Leon held the technical thread because Leon thinks in systems. Mere advanced the preparation because Mere doesn't wait for permission to solve problems. Devod stayed because Devod does what's needed. Carter resupplied because Carter sees what's needed before you ask. Ledger defended because Ledger chose this case and chose you for it.*)

(*You picked these people. Or they picked you. Either way — the selection criteria held. Every one of them performed exactly the function you'd have predicted if you'd run the scenario in advance. Which means the team isn't an accident. It's a design. And the design works even when the designer is face-down on hardwood.*)

(*Trust the chain. You said it in the spiral — the floor scenario, the last contingency. You meant it as mathematics. Turns out it's also true.*)

The noise tried to categorise what I was feeling and returned a null value. Some inputs don't fit the existing classification system. Some data points sit in the space between pattern and meaning, and the only honest response is to acknowledge that the system has limits.

I looked at the diagrams. At the jars. At the note, still on the floor where I'd read it.

"Tomorrow morning," I said. "Bedside observation. Then Mere completes the altered preparation. Then we break the curse."

Leon nodded. Mere didn't look up from her chart. Devod said, "I'll drive."

The bracelet warmed against my wrist. The stone shifted another shade closer to amber.

Almost ready.
