I thought you should know.
Satou read the letter twice.
He put it in the active file.
He looked at the command post wall.
At the maps. At the counter-doctrine documentation. At the settlement's population registry, now updated with eight new names.
He thought about Caldris on the road writing in his third journal.
About four people who had put their weapons down.
About a formal request that had been denied but was in the record.
About the most methodical man Cael had ever known, still working through something.
'We respond to what is,' he thought.
What was, was this.
He went to find Lyra.
She was with the child.
He sat beside them.
He told her about the letter.
She listened.
She was quiet.
"The denial is in the record," she said.
"Yes," he said.
"That matters," she said.
"Yes," he said.
She looked at the child.
At the ambient temporal awareness reading the room — reading both of them as familiar signatures in the settlement's field.
