Location:Seven Peaks — Diplomatic Office, Thorne's Office
Date/Time:TC1854.11.15-20
The third response arrived through the personal courier network on a morning when Tianlei said his first word.
The timing was the kind of coincidence that the universe produced without commentary — the best moment and the worst moment arriving in the same hour, occupying the same room, requiring the same man to hold them both.
Tianlei said "Da."
Not the ambiguous syllable from weeks ago — the sound that might have been a word or might have been a comment on porridge ballistics. This was deliberate. Clear. The boy was sitting on the floor of the residential quarters, holding a wooden block in each hand, and he looked up at Kael and said "Da" with the specific intonation of someone who had been working on this particular piece of vocabulary for some time and was now deploying it with full confidence in its meaning.
"Da."
