By noon Priya had flagged three things in Mei Ling's monitoring data that Mei Ling hadn't caught.By three PM she'd sent a preliminary report on all three.By five PM Mei Ling had cross-referenced everything and sent back a response that Harrison described as the most words he'd ever seen Mei Ling put in a single message.Jake read Priya's report. Then read it again.'That's extraordinary,' the Whisperer said.'Six months of reading the Convergence without knowing what she was doing,' Jake thought. 'And this is what she found.'He called Sora."Come look at this," he said when she picked up. "Priya's preliminary report.""I saw it," Sora said."You already read it," Jake said."I told her to copy me on everything she flags," Sora said. "Are you just finding this out.""I'm finding out you read it before I called," Jake said."I read everything Priya sends," Sora said. "Come to my office.""You come here," Jake said. "I have the full dataset on my screen."A pause. "Fine."She arrived

Jake divided the team.Lily and Yemi coordinated the category two contacts remotely. Hana's team confirmed they could handle three of the five urgent contacts in the Asia-Pacific region."The fourth contact is in Oslo," Yemi said. "I'm sending Nadia."Nadia nodded once from her screen."And the fifth," Jake said.Yemi looked at the camera. At Ren specifically. "I'd like Ren to handle the fifth contact," she said.The room went quiet. Not from disagreement, just everyone waiting to see how Ren responded.Ren was in her usual dark clothes with the pendant at her collar. Fourteen and unbothered.She looked at Yemi. "Tell me about her," she said."Her name is Catherine," Yemi said. "Forty-two. She's been experiencing the frequency sensitivity for about a month. She described it to me as her skin getting too thin. Like everything is arriving too close and she can't find the volume control.""Where i

Jake looked at him for a moment.Then he sat down.Marcus sat across from him. Elijah took the chair near the window and became very still and let the room have the conversation without him."Walk me through it," Jake said. "From the beginning. Not the summary. Everything."Marcus looked at his hands. At the table between them."Three weeks ago I was in a board meeting," he said. "Aldric's foundations board. The one I've been attending for forty years in various configurations."He looked at the table."I know those people. I know their patterns. And in the middle of a conversation about quarterly allocations I became aware that I could feel every person in the room.""Feel how," Jake said."Their frequency," Marcus said. "Not generally. Not the ambient quality of a group of people in a room. Each person specifically."He folded his hands."I could feel one board member's anxiety about the infrastructure proposal before he said anything. I could feel another's confidence. I could feel