Two weeks had passed since Gabriel's second proposal, and the weight of the decision had been pressing on me with increasing intensity every single day. The restoration work was progressing remarkably well – the mycorrhizal networks were responding to our interventions even faster than my most optimistic projections, and with two thousand gang members working under coordinated direction, we were accomplishing in days what would have taken months with conventional approaches.
But every success, every activated network node, every visible sign of forest regeneration just reminded me that the project timeline was counting down toward the moment when I would have to either accept or refuse Gabriel's offer.
