The collective threshold crossed on a morning in late autumn.
Kael felt it in the between-space before the Cost Sense data confirmed it — the specific quality of the deep layer shifting at the dawn hour, the crystallized absence below the door becoming lighter in the way that ice becomes lighter before it breaks.
Not breaking.
Lightening.
The door becoming significantly more permeable than it had been.
He was on the clinic roof.
He had been sleeping better than he had in months — the three weeks at home, the regular meals, the specific rest of being in a place that knew what it was. The work continuing but at the sustainable pace of the middle rather than the emergency pace of the beginning.
He woke at dawn and felt the shift and went to the roof.
Oren was already there.
They had felt it through the Cost Sense.
