New York arrived gray and cold, November sky pressing low over the city. Five years since convergence crisis killed 973,000 people here in seventy-two hours.
The memorial occupied twelve city blocks in lower Manhattan—names carved into black granite walls stretching the full perimeter, digital displays cycling through faces and service histories and brief biographical details that reduced lives to fragments but preserved something rather than nothing. Coalition had built it Year 2. Families maintained it since, adding flowers and photographs and small personal objects that accumulated in quiet testimony along the base of the walls.
Rama walked the perimeter with Maya Chen.
