The message arrived on a Monday.
It came through the secure inbox, the channel my father had built, the one Elara had used to send the audio recording. I had been checking it every two days with the clean device, a habit I maintained with the same mechanical consistency I brought to every other element of the plan, even in the weeks when maintaining it had required a level of compartmentalization that was costing me more than I was prepared to account for.
The message was longer than her previous communications.
That alone told me something before I had read a word of it.
Elara did not write at length unless she had calculated that length was necessary. Every word she committed to any channel that carried even theoretical risk was a word she had weighed against its necessity. A long message from Elara meant she had decided that brevity was insufficient for what she needed to convey. It meant she wanted me to understand not just the information but the weight of it.
