The verification window that Riku's transit had opened lasted forty-six hours.
Yuki had forty-six hours to access the system records, locate Mei's pathway through the echo portal, verify that her sister had arrived in the destination timeline intact, and complete her own transit.
She used thirty-eight of those hours for the records access. The remaining eight she spent on her own transit, which should have taken eight minutes.
The echo portal collapsed at the halfway point.
Not completely — the thirty-two percent probability she had calculated had always been of complete collapse, and this was something different, something she hadn't modeled: a partial failure, in which the portal lost coherence in the middle layers but held at the entry and exit points. She was, for approximately four minutes, in the space between.
She had been in the space between before. The nexus was technically the space between, and she had heard about the between-space from trial system briefings she had spent three years collecting. She knew it theoretically.
Knowing it theoretically was not the same as being in it.
The between-space was white and large and completely without sound, and in it, for four minutes, she was alone in the specific way that you can only be alone when you are between things — not in either place, not tethered to either world, just present in the gap.
She had been alone before. Three years in Polaris City, running her network, looking for her sister, doing the impossible work of maintaining a life in a world that was not hers while the reason for staying kept slipping further from reach — she knew alone. She was expert at alone.
But this was different.
Because in the between-space, she felt, for the first and only time, the system from the inside. Not from the user perspective, not from the navigating-around-it perspective she'd developed over three years. From the inside: the full architecture of it, the way the portals connected, the way the trial environments hung in their respective positions in the white, the way the nexus pulsed at the center like a heart. And threading through all of it, the anchor — both of them, the old one and the new one, running parallel, a doubled heartbeat that was simultaneously exhausted and determined and absolutely, unwillingly, magnificently holding.
She felt the other Kenji — the anchor — in the white. Not as a person, exactly; not a presence she could see or address. But as a quality of the space: the specific patience of someone who has been in one place for a very long time by choice, and who has made peace with the difference between what they wanted and what they were needed for.
She thought: hello.
The anchor didn't respond in words. But the white shifted, very briefly, in a way that felt like acknowledgment.
Then the echo portal recoherenced — imperfectly, jaggedly, with the effort of a system working past its design tolerances — and she was through.
She arrived in an alley behind a convenience store in Bunkyo at four in the morning, on her hands and knees on wet pavement, breathing fast.
She stayed there for approximately three minutes.
Then she stood up, straightened her jacket, checked her pockets for everything that needed to be there, and walked to the address Reiko had transmitted through the system before the window closed.
Reiko's house in Chiyoda.
She arrived at 4:47 a.m. and rang the bell.
Reiko answered in her dressing gown with the expression of someone who receives four-in-the-morning visitors regularly enough to have developed a dressing-gown-specific policy. "Kitchen," she said. "Tea's on."
Yuki sat at the kitchen table. She accepted the tea. She looked at the garden of ceramic cats through the window — the predawn darkness made their white-painted eyes catch the kitchen light in a way that was slightly unsettling and also, at this hour, unexpectedly comforting.
"They arrived safely?" she said.
"Yes. Mei is in Bunkyo. Ren is here, currently asleep upstairs. Your parents are —" Reiko looked at her carefully. "Your parents are in a district called Nerima. They came through eighteen months ago, through the mountain tunnel window. They are —" She let the pause do some work. "Intact. Well. Living under new names. They have been waiting."
Yuki looked at her tea.
"Three years," she said.
"Yes."
"They've been here for eighteen months."
"They arrived and immediately filed a request through the system's messaging protocol to find you. I've had the request in a folder." Reiko looked at her steadily. "I've been waiting to deliver it."
She put a folded piece of paper on the table. Not digital — physical. Someone had printed it on the paper from the transit documentation binder, in a font that was the default printer font and therefore entirely impersonal and entirely inadequate for what it was carrying.
Yuki opened it.
It was from her mother. It was two sentences.
The first sentence said: We are safe and we are here and we are looking for you.
The second sentence said: Your father cooks rice every Sunday morning and sets five bowls.
Five bowls. For a family of four.
Yuki held the paper for a long time without speaking.
Reiko refilled her tea without being asked and went back to her chair and looked at the garden of ceramic cats and allowed the specific silence of a person receiving something they have waited too long for to expand to its full size.
At six in the morning, when the first light was touching the garden, Yuki said: "I need to see Mei first. Before my parents. I need to see her first."
"I understand."
"And I need to know —" She stopped. Started again. "What does she — she was in the forest for thirty-one years, subjectively. I need to know what she's —" She searched for the right framing. "What she needs from me. Before I see her."
Reiko looked at her with the clear, unhurried assessment of someone who has seen many transitioning families and knows that the relationships are the most complicated part of the infrastructure.
"She needs," Reiko said, "exactly what she has been waiting thirty-one subjective years for: for her sister to come through a portal and not be collapsed. She has been very patient."
Yuki looked at the paper in her hands. The rice bowls.
"She was always more patient than me," she said.
"You were patient enough," Reiko said. "You stayed."
— ✦ —
At eight o'clock, Ren came downstairs and found his sister sitting at the kitchen table, and the reunion was quiet, the way the reunions are quiet when what was feared has finally been released and what remains is just the fact of each other. Yuki held him for a long time. He held her back. Neither of them said anything that required words. But over his shoulder, Yuki was looking at the stairs, at the sound of movement from the room above — the room where Mei was — and her face had the specific, sustained expression of someone who has been building toward a single moment for three years and is now forty-five seconds from it and cannot yet tell if they have the structural integrity for it. The door at the top of the stairs opened. Mei appeared. She stood at the top of the stairs looking down at her sister and her sister looked up at her. Eleven years old in body, thirty-one years old in patience, and she looked down at Yuki with eyes that had been waiting long enough that they had stopped looking like waiting and started looking like knowing. She said: "I knew you'd make it through." Yuki, who had kept herself together through three years of searching and a partial portal collapse and forty-six hours of system access work and four minutes in the between-space alone, said: "The echo collapsed on me. Halfway through." "I know. I felt it." Mei came down the stairs. "The forest still has me a little. I can feel the system." She stopped three steps from the bottom. They were level: an eleven-year-old girl and her sixteen-year-old sister who had stayed three years in a floating city to find her. "Does it hurt?" Yuki asked, meaning the forest connection, the residual code. Mei thought about it seriously, the way she thought about everything seriously. "No," she said. "It's just — extra. Extra knowing." She took the last three steps and held her arms out, and Yuki, who had not cried in three years, cried. In the kitchen, Reiko quietly started a new pot of tea. Outside, a delivery drone hummed past. Tokyo went about its morning, entirely unaware of the reunion happening in a narrow house in Chiyoda, and the world kept its scale.