Callis did not send anyone.Kael had expected a response within forty-eight hours, something measured and institutional, a regulatory notice, a license query routed through the authority’s standard channels, the kind of managed pressure that communicated awareness without committing to confrontation. He had prepared for that. He had laid his counter-position against it the way you lay a beam against a load, knowing the weight before it arrived.What he got instead was silence, and silence from someone who moved the way Callis moved was not absence. It was a different kind of presence.He sat at Fen’s folding table on the second morning after the annex meeting and worked through it the way he worked through fracture architecture, not from the surface but from the grammar underneath. Callis had arrived in person for a reclassification form. She had composed herself in a room where her position was eroding in real time and had not flinched. She had made one near-slip, one moment where he