Three months passed.
They were strange months: tense, watchful, and unnervingly domestic. Outside the penthouse windows, Avalon went about its business with no idea that a clock was running in our rooms. Alyssara had said two years on a broken roof. Seventeen months were left of them now, and every sunrise felt like a small, stubborn win against a deadline.
This morning was a portrait of the contradiction. Spring had finally arrived, thin and green, and sunlight came through the tall glass onto the controlled chaos of Stella's latest project. Schematics and half-built prototypes had colonised the living-room floor. Stella, thirteen and a quarter by her own careful count, lay on her stomach in the middle of them, arguing with Rachel about gear ratios for a kinetic driver.
"But if you push the torque up, the friction loss compounds after the third rotation!" Stella jabbed her pencil at a diagram. "Exponentially."
