The stabilized junction held past twelve minutes, then thirteen, Sekar's instruments registering no hint of the strain that had ended every previous attempt at this exact threshold. Whatever the conversation demanded from Meridian's side to sustain, it was holding steady rather than eroding—a detail Sekar noted with the specific part of her attention that never stopped monitoring structural integrity, even as the rest of her focus remained fixed on what Sohrn had just told them.
Rama let the silence stretch for a moment, giving the words actively seal something away the weight they deserved rather than rushing past them toward the next question.
"I need to understand what happened," he said finally. "Not the outcome. The process. What did 'engagement produced escalating harm' actually mean, concretely, for the people who attempted it."
