The emergency ward at 02:00 on a Wednesday night had a specific quality that Mina had come to think of as the third shift settling. The first hour was transitions, handoffs, the administrative texture of a ward changing hands. The second hour was assessment — the day’s loose ends, the new admissions, the cases that needed a fresh set of eyes. By the third hour, by 02:00, the ward had found its nighttime rhythm: slower, quieter, the particular focus of a place that was still fully operational but had stopped pretending that nighttime was the same as day.
Mina was sitting at the nursing station reviewing discharge summaries when she noticed the monitor for Bed Four flickering.
Park Sungwoo had been moved upstairs, but the bed had a new occupant: a woman in her sixties, admitted for observation after a syncopal episode, entirely unremarkable in her presentation, her monitor tracking its green lines with the steady contentment of a system with nothing to report. The flicker was brief — a single frame of distortion in the cardiac trace, there and gone, the kind of artifact that appeared in monitors that were ten years old and had been dropped twice. Mina logged it and returned to her discharge summaries.
Three minutes later, it happened again.
Not on the same monitor. On the neural monitoring unit that had been brought back to the ward for a new patient in Bed Eight: a trial participant from the Starline commercial rollout, admitted twelve hours ago with “unresponsive during return journey.” She had read the admission notes twice, carefully, comparing the language against Park Sungwoo’s file. The language was nearly identical. The same template, she thought, or close enough to one.
The neural monitor for Bed Eight pulsed blue.
Mina was already standing. Old reflex: the blue light meant something, even if she could not yet say what it meant. She was at the curtain in seconds, checking the patient — stable, breathing, vitals unchanged, the surface of the situation exactly as she had left it. The neural monitor sat in its bracket, its status strip showing the amber of normal operation. No blue. No malfunction.
She stood in the curtained space for a moment, looking at the monitor.
Then she sat down on the stool beside the bed, because she was tired and because the patient was stable and because something in the quality of the night had shifted in a way she could not yet articulate, and she found herself not wanting to be at the nursing station when it shifted further.
The ward sounds filtered through the curtain: a cart moving in the corridor, the distant voice of the night nurse handling a call, the low hum of equipment maintaining its vigil. Mina sat with her hands in her lap and looked at the patient in Bed Eight and thought about Liora Vale’s voice on the phone yesterday afternoon.
*My brother hasn’t woken up. He was also on the 00:17.*
She thought about Park Sungwoo’s notebook. *The doctor who doesn’t sleep.*
She thought about her own access logs: four files, 01:58, a time when she was demonstrably asleep in the on-call room one floor above.
She had a list, now. She had started it after the call with Liora, in the grey notebook she kept for thoughts that needed space to develop: names, dates, connections, the careful topology of a thing she could not yet fully see. Park Sungwoo. The admission notes that read like a template. The neural monitoring device that the neurology department had brought down specifically for a patient they had already decided where to route. The access logs. Dain’s face when she said *Starline*.
The list was not long enough yet. It needed more data before it became the kind of thing you could take to someone else and have it mean anything. She knew this. She was building it anyway.
She fell asleep on the stool.
She did not intend to. She was looking at the patient and thinking and then she was somewhere else, in the clean transition of extreme exhaustion, the body deciding for itself that thinking was over and this was what was happening now.
The station.
But different tonight. She was not on the platform. She was in a corridor — a train corridor, the kind that ran the length of a carriage, narrow and lit with low amber strips along the floor. The ceiling was low. The windows were dark, the darkness outside total, but above a certain point the walls simply stopped existing and the sky was there: the same star-dense sky, impossibly close, watching.
She walked.
The corridor extended ahead of her further than it should have, the perspective of it long and slightly wrong in the way that perspectives were wrong in places where distance was not behaving. Doors on either side: closed doors, all of them, each one slightly different in color and texture, as if they led to different things.
She did not try the doors. She walked.
At the end of the corridor — or at a point in the corridor where the corridor chose to end — there was a window. Not a train window. A large window, the kind that belonged in a building, looking out on the platform she recognized: the two-sided platform, the dark tracks, the star-heavy sky. And on the opposite platform, which was clearly visible from here, there was a man.
He was doing something. Crouching down near the platform edge, looking at something on the track bed, with the focused attention of someone who was checking something rather than waiting for something. He had a phone out. He was taking notes, or photographs, his face angled down.
She put her hand flat against the glass.
As if he felt it, he looked up.
Still not clearly visible — the light was still wrong for faces, still too diffuse to resolve features — but she could see the direction of his attention. The specific orientation of someone who had heard something and was determining the source. He was looking at the window. At her hand against the glass.
He stood up.
He took a step toward the platform edge.
The train came between them.
Mina pressed her hand harder against the glass as the train passed, as if she could push through the impediment of it, as if wanting it enough would change the physics. The train was long. It passed for what felt like too long, the way trains in bad dreams always ran longer than their real counterparts, and when it was gone the opposite platform was empty.
She stood at the window with her hand still against the glass.
The starlight fell on the empty platform. The tracks were still. She could see, on the opposite platform’s floor, something small and rectangular: a phone, or a notebook, or whatever he had been using to take notes. He had left it when he stepped toward the edge. He had left it when he came toward her.
She woke at the nursing station.
She was in her chair, not on the stool in Bed Eight, and for a confused moment she did not know when the transition had happened, whether she had walked back out to the station or whether the dream had rearranged the geography. The clock above the station read 03:19. The ward was quiet. The night nurse at the adjacent station was absorbed in something on her own screen and had apparently noticed nothing.
Mina looked at her right hand.
She had no memory of pressing it against anything. It felt normal. It looked normal. She flexed it twice.
She pulled her grey notebook from her bag and added a new entry: *Third dream parallel. He was working. I found him from a different angle — corridor, not platform. He looked up when I put my hand on the glass. The train separated us again. He left something behind on his platform.*
She underlined the last sentence.
She thought about what it meant that he had stepped toward her and dropped what he was holding.
She thought about what it would mean, if this were a real place — and she was becoming less certain it was not a real place, in some register she did not have good language for — to try to reach what he had left behind.
She made herself think about it clinically. Two people experiencing the same shared-space dream, correlated with exposure to the same electromagnetic frequency, in the context of a technology that interfaced directly with neural sleep patterns. The literature on shared dreaming was thin and largely discredited, but the literature had been written before a company built a sleep train that plugged its passengers into a collective neural network and called it *rest*.
The patient in Bed Eight had been on the 00:17.
Park Sungwoo had been on the 00:17.
Noel Vale had been on the 00:17.
Something happened on the 00:17. And she and a man she had never met were, for reasons she did not yet fully understand, experiencing some secondary version of it: not trapped, not unresponsive, but connected to the same frequency, able to enter the same space, finding each other in it with the persistence of a signal that kept routing itself back to the same destination.
She added to her notebook: *Kai Arven, Aureon Bay. Rail maintenance engineer. Liora says he may be experiencing the same thing. Cross-reference: Bluefall window, electromagnetic exposure, physical symptom — frequency in hand.*
She looked at the name.
She did not know why she was more certain of him tonight than she had been yesterday. Something about the way he had looked up from his work when she put her hand against the glass. Something about the fact that he had been working — that even here, in this place, he was doing something methodical, careful, directed toward understanding the system he was in.
She recognized that quality. She had it herself.
The ward continued its nighttime operations around her. Monitors beeped. A patient in curtain two murmured and was still. The night nurse got up to check on curtain five and came back with the settled expression of someone whose check had confirmed what they expected.
Mina sat at the nursing station with her notebook open and the ward’s familiar sounds around her, and for the first time since the Bluefall night, the feeling of something missed and unnameable had a direction to it.
North. Or whatever the equivalent was, in the geography of this.
Toward the man on the platform who had stepped forward when she raised her hand.
She was going to need to find him outside the dream.
She stayed on shift until 07:00, as scheduled, and used the last three hours to do three things.
First, she pulled every admission from the past four months that involved altered consciousness, unexplained unresponsiveness, or notation of prior Starline travel. She found nine. She documented them in her grey notebook in a table: name, date, admission presentation, current status, department handling the case. Six were in neurology. Two had been discharged with incomplete follow-up. One was Park Sungwoo, currently upstairs.
Second, she pulled her own access logs again, this time going back three months rather than one. She found seven instances of her account accessing files she had not accessed: always between 01:00 and 03:00, always on nights when she was on the overnight shift, always for patients whose files she recognized from her incomplete table.
Someone with access to her credentials was pulling files on Starline-adjacent patients. Someone who knew the ward schedule, knew when she would be asleep, and had been doing this long enough that the pattern was visible if you looked for it.
She looked for it. She found it.
Third, she searched for Kai Arven.
This was easy, embarrassingly easy, because Liora’s fanpage came up in the third search result and the fanpage had a photograph. She looked at it for longer than she intended. It was the photograph from the transport journal interview — she would find this out later — taken in what appeared to be a rail maintenance facility, fluorescent light, the kind of background that was functional rather than chosen. He was in the frame slightly sideways, as if he had been caught mid-turn, not quite looking at the camera. Dark hair. A face that was not unkind but was not offering anything. The expression of someone who had learned to give the lens as little as possible.
Beneath the expression: the quality she recognized from the dream, though she had not been able to see his face clearly there. The focused, slightly wary attention of someone who was always, at some level, listening.
She closed the search.
At 07:00, she handed off to the day team and went upstairs. Not to the on-call room. To the fourth floor, to the neurology ward, to the room where Park Sungwoo had been transferred.
He was in a private room at the end of the corridor, which was unusual for an observation patient. The door was closed. A nurse she did not recognize — not the standard neurology rotation, someone she had not seen on this floor before — was sitting at the room’s exterior chart station. She looked up when Mina approached.
“Dr. Seol. Emergency ward.” Mina showed her ID. “I admitted this patient. I wanted to check in on him.”
The nurse’s expression was professionally neutral in the specific way of someone who had been briefed on something. “The case has been transferred to neurology. Dr. Voss is the attending.”
“I know. I just want to see how he’s doing.”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Seol. Dr. Voss has requested restricted access pending family consent protocol.”
Mina looked at the closed door.
Family consent protocol was a standard procedure — applied when a patient’s family had not yet been located or had requested limited contact. It was occasionally misapplied, or applied for reasons other than its intended purpose. She knew this. She also knew that raising this point to a nurse who was clearly following instructions would accomplish nothing and would generate a conversation that would find its way back to Dain before she was ready for it to.
“Thank you,” she said.
She took the elevator down. She stood in the hospital lobby for a moment, in the morning foot traffic of shift change, and thought about Dain’s name on the attending line of Park Sungwoo’s case. She thought about the nurse who had not been on the standard rotation. She thought about *restricted access* applied to a patient with no documented family contact and no emergency consent on file.
She took out her phone and texted Liora: *I tried to see Park Sungwoo this morning. Restricted access, Dain Voss attending. We need to talk more carefully. Are you free this afternoon?*
The response came four minutes later, as Mina was pushing through the hospital’s main doors into the morning: *Free now. I’m in Narae until tomorrow. I came to see if I could reach the patients here.*
Mina stopped on the steps.
She typed: *Where are you?*
*Coffee place on Seon-daero, near the hospital. Green sign. I’m the one who looks like she hasn’t slept.*
Mina almost smiled at that. She walked.
Liora was slight and sharp-featured and younger than she had sounded on the phone, and she did look like she hadn’t slept, and she had a canvas bag on the table next to her coffee cup that was clearly carrying more than a person needed for a cafe visit. She looked up when Mina came in with the specific alertness of someone who had been waiting and had decided to use the waiting productively.
Mina sat down across from her.
For a moment neither of them said anything. There was a quality to the silence of two people who had been pursuing the same information from different angles finally occupying the same space: the slight recalibration, the brief mutual assessment, the adjustment of expectations to account for the fact that the other person was real.
“You look like someone who doesn’t stop working,” Liora said.
“You look like someone who can’t afford to,” Mina said.
Liora looked at her for a moment. Then she reached into the canvas bag and put a notebook on the table. It was small, dark blue, the cardboard cover slightly warped from being handled often. The name written on the inside cover, visible when Liora opened it, was *Noel Vale*.
“He wrote fifty-three pages before the trial run,” Liora said. “I’ve read them so many times I could recite them. But some of it I still don’t understand.” She turned to a page near the middle and turned the notebook to face Mina. “This part.”
Mina read.
Noel’s handwriting was small and precise for a seventeen-year-old, the handwriting of someone who took notes seriously. The entry was dated three days before the trial run, and it described a dream: a train station, a starlit sky, two platforms with dark tracks between them. It described a doctor on one platform who had dark hair and moved like she was always slightly short on time. It described a man on the other platform who crouched down to look at things before other people noticed they were worth looking at.
It described them finding each other.
It described, in the careful notation of someone reporting an observation, the line of light that connected their two stars in the sky above the station.
Mina read the entry twice.
“He dreamed this before the trial run,” she said.
“Three days before,” Liora confirmed. “I don’t know what it means. But I think it means you were already connected to the system somehow. Before you knew about it.”
Mina looked at the notebook. At Noel’s precise handwriting describing a place she had been to six times in the past two weeks.
She thought about the dream last night. The corridor. The window. The man crouching down on the opposite platform to examine something with focused, methodical attention.
She thought about Kai Arven’s photograph, the expression that was not offering anything, the listening quality beneath it.
“I need to reach him,” she said. “The engineer in Aureon. I need to compare notes with him outside of…” She gestured vaguely, because there was no clean word for *outside of the recurring dream we apparently share*. “Outside.”
Liora nodded. “I know. I’m meeting him today.”
Mina looked at her.
“He responded,” Liora said, with the particular flatness of someone who had spent months shouting into a void and was still adjusting to the experience of being heard. “Yesterday morning. He corrected two errors in my analysis and told me to come with everything I have.”
Mina thought about that. The correcting of errors before agreeing to meet. The *bring everything*.
Yes, she thought. That sounded right.
“Tell him about me,” she said. “Tell him I’m in.”
You've reached the end of this chapter
The emergency ward at 02:00 on a Wednesday night had a specific quality that Mina had come to think of as the third shift settling. The first hour was transitions, handoffs, the administrative texture of a ward changing hands. The second hour was assessment — the day’s loose ends, the new admissions, the cases that needed a fresh set of eyes. By the third hour, by 02:00, the ward had found its nighttime rhythm: slower, quieter, the particular focus of a place that was still fully operational but had stopped pretending that nighttime was the same as day.
Mina was sitting at the nursing station reviewing discharge summaries when she noticed the monitor for Bed Four flickering.
Park Sungwoo had been moved upstairs, but the bed had a new occupant: a woman in her sixties, admitted for observation after a syncopal episode, entirely unremarkable in her presentation, her monitor tracking its green lines with the steady contentment of a system with nothing to report. The flicker was brief — a single frame of distortion in the cardiac trace, there and gone, the kind of artifact that appeared in monitors that were ten years old and had been dropped twice. Mina logged it and returned to her discharge summaries.
Three minutes later, it happened again.
Not on the same monitor. On the neural monitoring unit that had been brought back to the ward for a new patient in Bed Eight: a trial participant from the Starline commercial rollout, admitted twelve hours ago with “unresponsive during return journey.” She had read the admission notes twice, carefully, comparing the language against Park Sungwoo’s file. The language was nearly identical. The same template, she thought, or close enough to one.
The neural monitor for Bed Eight pulsed blue.
Mina was already standing. Old reflex: the blue light meant something, even if she could not yet say what it meant. She was at the curtain in seconds, checking the patient — stable, breathing, vitals unchanged, the surface of the situation exactly as she had left it. The neural monitor sat in its bracket, its status strip showing the amber of normal operation. No blue. No malfunction.
She stood in the curtained space for a moment, looking at the monitor.
Then she sat down on the stool beside the bed, because she was tired and because the patient was stable and because something in the quality of the night had shifted in a way she could not yet articulate, and she found herself not wanting to be at the nursing station when it shifted further.
The ward sounds filtered through the curtain: a cart moving in the corridor, the distant voice of the night nurse handling a call, the low hum of equipment maintaining its vigil. Mina sat with her hands in her lap and looked at the patient in Bed Eight and thought about Liora Vale’s voice on the phone yesterday afternoon.
*My brother hasn’t woken up. He was also on the 00:17.*
She thought about Park Sungwoo’s notebook. *The doctor who doesn’t sleep.*
She thought about her own access logs: four files, 01:58, a time when she was demonstrably asleep in the on-call room one floor above.
She had a list, now. She had started it after the call with Liora, in the grey notebook she kept for thoughts that needed space to develop: names, dates, connections, the careful topology of a thing she could not yet fully see. Park Sungwoo. The admission notes that read like a template. The neural monitoring device that the neurology department had brought down specifically for a patient they had already decided where to route. The access logs. Dain’s face when she said *Starline*.
The list was not long enough yet. It needed more data before it became the kind of thing you could take to someone else and have it mean anything. She knew this. She was building it anyway.
She fell asleep on the stool.
She did not intend to. She was looking at the patient and thinking and then she was somewhere else, in the clean transition of extreme exhaustion, the body deciding for itself that thinking was over and this was what was happening now.
The station.
But different tonight. She was not on the platform. She was in a corridor — a train corridor, the kind that ran the length of a carriage, narrow and lit with low amber strips along the floor. The ceiling was low. The windows were dark, the darkness outside total, but above a certain point the walls simply stopped existing and the sky was there: the same star-dense sky, impossibly close, watching.
She walked.
The corridor extended ahead of her further than it should have, the perspective of it long and slightly wrong in the way that perspectives were wrong in places where distance was not behaving. Doors on either side: closed doors, all of them, each one slightly different in color and texture, as if they led to different things.
She did not try the doors. She walked.
At the end of the corridor — or at a point in the corridor where the corridor chose to end — there was a window. Not a train window. A large window, the kind that belonged in a building, looking out on the platform she recognized: the two-sided platform, the dark tracks, the star-heavy sky. And on the opposite platform, which was clearly visible from here, there was a man.
He was doing something. Crouching down near the platform edge, looking at something on the track bed, with the focused attention of someone who was checking something rather than waiting for something. He had a phone out. He was taking notes, or photographs, his face angled down.
She put her hand flat against the glass.
As if he felt it, he looked up.
Still not clearly visible — the light was still wrong for faces, still too diffuse to resolve features — but she could see the direction of his attention. The specific orientation of someone who had heard something and was determining the source. He was looking at the window. At her hand against the glass.
He stood up.
He took a step toward the platform edge.
The train came between them.
Mina pressed her hand harder against the glass as the train passed, as if she could push through the impediment of it, as if wanting it enough would change the physics. The train was long. It passed for what felt like too long, the way trains in bad dreams always ran longer than their real counterparts, and when it was gone the opposite platform was empty.
She stood at the window with her hand still against the glass.
The starlight fell on the empty platform. The tracks were still. She could see, on the opposite platform’s floor, something small and rectangular: a phone, or a notebook, or whatever he had been using to take notes. He had left it when he stepped toward the edge. He had left it when he came toward her.
She woke at the nursing station.
She was in her chair, not on the stool in Bed Eight, and for a confused moment she did not know when the transition had happened, whether she had walked back out to the station or whether the dream had rearranged the geography. The clock above the station read 03:19. The ward was quiet. The night nurse at the adjacent station was absorbed in something on her own screen and had apparently noticed nothing.
Mina looked at her right hand.
She had no memory of pressing it against anything. It felt normal. It looked normal. She flexed it twice.
She pulled her grey notebook from her bag and added a new entry: *Third dream parallel. He was working. I found him from a different angle — corridor, not platform. He looked up when I put my hand on the glass. The train separated us again. He left something behind on his platform.*
She underlined the last sentence.
She thought about what it meant that he had stepped toward her and dropped what he was holding.
She thought about what it would mean, if this were a real place — and she was becoming less certain it was not a real place, in some register she did not have good language for — to try to reach what he had left behind.
She made herself think about it clinically. Two people experiencing the same shared-space dream, correlated with exposure to the same electromagnetic frequency, in the context of a technology that interfaced directly with neural sleep patterns. The literature on shared dreaming was thin and largely discredited, but the literature had been written before a company built a sleep train that plugged its passengers into a collective neural network and called it *rest*.
The patient in Bed Eight had been on the 00:17.
Park Sungwoo had been on the 00:17.
Noel Vale had been on the 00:17.
Something happened on the 00:17. And she and a man she had never met were, for reasons she did not yet fully understand, experiencing some secondary version of it: not trapped, not unresponsive, but connected to the same frequency, able to enter the same space, finding each other in it with the persistence of a signal that kept routing itself back to the same destination.
She added to her notebook: *Kai Arven, Aureon Bay. Rail maintenance engineer. Liora says he may be experiencing the same thing. Cross-reference: Bluefall window, electromagnetic exposure, physical symptom — frequency in hand.*
She looked at the name.
She did not know why she was more certain of him tonight than she had been yesterday. Something about the way he had looked up from his work when she put her hand against the glass. Something about the fact that he had been working — that even here, in this place, he was doing something methodical, careful, directed toward understanding the system he was in.
She recognized that quality. She had it herself.
The ward continued its nighttime operations around her. Monitors beeped. A patient in curtain two murmured and was still. The night nurse got up to check on curtain five and came back with the settled expression of someone whose check had confirmed what they expected.
Mina sat at the nursing station with her notebook open and the ward’s familiar sounds around her, and for the first time since the Bluefall night, the feeling of something missed and unnameable had a direction to it.
North. Or whatever the equivalent was, in the geography of this.
Toward the man on the platform who had stepped forward when she raised her hand.
She was going to need to find him outside the dream.
She stayed on shift until 07:00, as scheduled, and used the last three hours to do three things.
First, she pulled every admission from the past four months that involved altered consciousness, unexplained unresponsiveness, or notation of prior Starline travel. She found nine. She documented them in her grey notebook in a table: name, date, admission presentation, current status, department handling the case. Six were in neurology. Two had been discharged with incomplete follow-up. One was Park Sungwoo, currently upstairs.
Second, she pulled her own access logs again, this time going back three months rather than one. She found seven instances of her account accessing files she had not accessed: always between 01:00 and 03:00, always on nights when she was on the overnight shift, always for patients whose files she recognized from her incomplete table.
Someone with access to her credentials was pulling files on Starline-adjacent patients. Someone who knew the ward schedule, knew when she would be asleep, and had been doing this long enough that the pattern was visible if you looked for it.
She looked for it. She found it.
Third, she searched for Kai Arven.
This was easy, embarrassingly easy, because Liora’s fanpage came up in the third search result and the fanpage had a photograph. She looked at it for longer than she intended. It was the photograph from the transport journal interview — she would find this out later — taken in what appeared to be a rail maintenance facility, fluorescent light, the kind of background that was functional rather than chosen. He was in the frame slightly sideways, as if he had been caught mid-turn, not quite looking at the camera. Dark hair. A face that was not unkind but was not offering anything. The expression of someone who had learned to give the lens as little as possible.
Beneath the expression: the quality she recognized from the dream, though she had not been able to see his face clearly there. The focused, slightly wary attention of someone who was always, at some level, listening.
She closed the search.
At 07:00, she handed off to the day team and went upstairs. Not to the on-call room. To the fourth floor, to the neurology ward, to the room where Park Sungwoo had been transferred.
He was in a private room at the end of the corridor, which was unusual for an observation patient. The door was closed. A nurse she did not recognize — not the standard neurology rotation, someone she had not seen on this floor before — was sitting at the room’s exterior chart station. She looked up when Mina approached.
“Dr. Seol. Emergency ward.” Mina showed her ID. “I admitted this patient. I wanted to check in on him.”
The nurse’s expression was professionally neutral in the specific way of someone who had been briefed on something. “The case has been transferred to neurology. Dr. Voss is the attending.”
“I know. I just want to see how he’s doing.”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Seol. Dr. Voss has requested restricted access pending family consent protocol.”
Mina looked at the closed door.
Family consent protocol was a standard procedure — applied when a patient’s family had not yet been located or had requested limited contact. It was occasionally misapplied, or applied for reasons other than its intended purpose. She knew this. She also knew that raising this point to a nurse who was clearly following instructions would accomplish nothing and would generate a conversation that would find its way back to Dain before she was ready for it to.
“Thank you,” she said.
She took the elevator down. She stood in the hospital lobby for a moment, in the morning foot traffic of shift change, and thought about Dain’s name on the attending line of Park Sungwoo’s case. She thought about the nurse who had not been on the standard rotation. She thought about *restricted access* applied to a patient with no documented family contact and no emergency consent on file.
She took out her phone and texted Liora: *I tried to see Park Sungwoo this morning. Restricted access, Dain Voss attending. We need to talk more carefully. Are you free this afternoon?*
The response came four minutes later, as Mina was pushing through the hospital’s main doors into the morning: *Free now. I’m in Narae until tomorrow. I came to see if I could reach the patients here.*
Mina stopped on the steps.
She typed: *Where are you?*
*Coffee place on Seon-daero, near the hospital. Green sign. I’m the one who looks like she hasn’t slept.*
Mina almost smiled at that. She walked.
Liora was slight and sharp-featured and younger than she had sounded on the phone, and she did look like she hadn’t slept, and she had a canvas bag on the table next to her coffee cup that was clearly carrying more than a person needed for a cafe visit. She looked up when Mina came in with the specific alertness of someone who had been waiting and had decided to use the waiting productively.
Mina sat down across from her.
For a moment neither of them said anything. There was a quality to the silence of two people who had been pursuing the same information from different angles finally occupying the same space: the slight recalibration, the brief mutual assessment, the adjustment of expectations to account for the fact that the other person was real.
“You look like someone who doesn’t stop working,” Liora said.
“You look like someone who can’t afford to,” Mina said.
Liora looked at her for a moment. Then she reached into the canvas bag and put a notebook on the table. It was small, dark blue, the cardboard cover slightly warped from being handled often. The name written on the inside cover, visible when Liora opened it, was *Noel Vale*.
“He wrote fifty-three pages before the trial run,” Liora said. “I’ve read them so many times I could recite them. But some of it I still don’t understand.” She turned to a page near the middle and turned the notebook to face Mina. “This part.”
Mina read.
Noel’s handwriting was small and precise for a seventeen-year-old, the handwriting of someone who took notes seriously. The entry was dated three days before the trial run, and it described a dream: a train station, a starlit sky, two platforms with dark tracks between them. It described a doctor on one platform who had dark hair and moved like she was always slightly short on time. It described a man on the other platform who crouched down to look at things before other people noticed they were worth looking at.
It described them finding each other.
It described, in the careful notation of someone reporting an observation, the line of light that connected their two stars in the sky above the station.
Mina read the entry twice.
“He dreamed this before the trial run,” she said.
“Three days before,” Liora confirmed. “I don’t know what it means. But I think it means you were already connected to the system somehow. Before you knew about it.”
Mina looked at the notebook. At Noel’s precise handwriting describing a place she had been to six times in the past two weeks.
She thought about the dream last night. The corridor. The window. The man crouching down on the opposite platform to examine something with focused, methodical attention.
She thought about Kai Arven’s photograph, the expression that was not offering anything, the listening quality beneath it.
“I need to reach him,” she said. “The engineer in Aureon. I need to compare notes with him outside of…” She gestured vaguely, because there was no clean word for *outside of the recurring dream we apparently share*. “Outside.”
Liora nodded. “I know. I’m meeting him today.”
Mina looked at her.
“He responded,” Liora said, with the particular flatness of someone who had spent months shouting into a void and was still adjusting to the experience of being heard. “Yesterday morning. He corrected two errors in my analysis and told me to come with everything I have.”
Mina thought about that. The correcting of errors before agreeing to meet. The *bring everything*.
Yes, she thought. That sounded right.
“Tell him about me,” she said. “Tell him I’m in.”
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