Maren joined the inner circle formally within the week, myself, Dorian, Selene, and Maren, the configuration that would carry the alliance's deepest intelligence work forward, with Kira, Adrian, and Viktor operating as trusted extensions rather than full members of the original four. The station itself became a second base of operations, Maren's fourteen months of careful, patient work now folded into everything the rest of us had spent forty-five days building, two separate infrastructures merging into something neither of us could have assembled alone. Adrian took to the arrangement immediately, treating the station's practical logistics, supply routes, sightlines, evacuation contingencies, as a puzzle worth solving on its own merits, and within days he'd become nearly as familiar with the building as Maren herself.Viktor's role settled more slowly, his years of Covenant experience proving useful for reading the political undercurrents of the alliance itself, the careful diplomacy

Outside the gate, the street was empty except for the three of us and the gate-glow staining the buildings orange. Kira didn't let it go. She'd been quiet through the whole walk out of the instance, the particular stillness she got when something hadn't finished settling into place, and the second we crossed back into open air, it broke, the questions coming faster than I'd heard her ask anything in weeks."Passage," she said, once we'd put some distance behind us, her voice low but insistent. "That's a class designation. It knew it specifically. It said your name like it had been waiting a long time to use it.""It's what your class becomes," I said. "At full evolution. Architect of Passage." Saying it out loud made it feel more real than reading it off a boss monster's dissolving text ever had, like naming a thing gave it weight it hadn't fully carried until that moment.She walked in silence for half a block, working through it, the gate-glow catching the side of her face the same

Day 55. I'd just come from checking on a shipment of medical supplies Maren's contacts had routed to us, the kind of errand that used to feel beneath a man carrying a hidden class named after a gate that didn't exist yet, and now felt like the only normal thing left in my entire day. Nora was in the corridor outside the medical bay again. Same spot. But her face was different this time. Worried, not just watching.She'd become a fixture in that corridor over the last few weeks. Her mother, Priya, had come in with the third wave of refugees, half-starved and barely holding together, and somewhere in that first chaotic week I'd learned that her daughter saw things. Colors around people. Weather that wasn't weather. Priya had mentioned it once, almost embarrassed, like she expected me to tell her it was nothing. I hadn't told her that. Kira's readings kept confirming what Nora said, word for word, sometimes days before Kira's own passive caught up to it."You're getting brighter," she sa

Day 61. With the Vantage Calibration Protocol thread still unresolved and the timeline pressing harder by the week, I turned my attention back to the Covenant. Specifically to Cass Halley, Prosper Hale's operational director, who'd reached out through Hale's channel asking for a direct meeting.I hadn't spent much time with Halley before this. What I knew came secondhand, from Viktor mostly, who described her as the person who actually kept the Covenant running while Hale handled the politics of running it. She met us at the door herself, no escort, no formality, and led us through a building that had clearly seen better funding before the restructuring started eating into everything. Half the offices we passed sat empty, chairs stacked, the particular quiet of an institution mid-collapse trying to hold itself together long enough to become something else."I've drafted something," she said, when we sat down at the restructured Covenant's central office, sliding the papers across with

Day 67. With the Covenant restructured and Cass Halley's framework gaining traction, Viktor found his footing in a role I hadn't expected at all, not in a hundred versions of how I'd imagined this timeline going. Inter-faction diplomacy, leveraging the trust he'd rebuilt since the accounting into something genuinely useful.I found him in the library that morning, papers spread across the table in the same organized chaos Selene usually left behind, except this time the notes weren't tactical, they were diplomatic, careful drafts of language meant to hold three separate factions to the same promise without any of them feeling like they'd surrendered ground to the others. He'd clearly been at it for hours, a cold cup of tea forgotten near his elbow, the particular focus of a man who'd found work he actually cared about doing well, the kind of focus I hadn't seen from him since long before any of this started."I want to formalize the alliance network," he said, laying out a proposal th