Chapter 370: What GeneCorp Knows
Five days passed before any rider came back. It wasn't the one carrying the joint letter — that one was still out there somewhere, four or five days into its own road west. This rider was answering something older.
Zone Ten held steady through the wait. The fifth ring kept its softened brightness, neither sharper nor dimmer, the way a held note stays held once nobody's pushing on it. Kai checked it every morning out of habit more than hope. Nothing new. He wrote no change in his father's book four days running and did not pretend that not-changing was the same as finished.
His pool had climbed to ninety-three percent, as high as it climbed anymore. No sessions, no reads, nothing to spend it on. Just waiting.
