She had been expecting him for three days.
She did not say this immediately. She said it after she had risen from her desk and walked to the inner room at the Archive building's rear—not the main archive floor with its catalogued shelving, a smaller room Kai had not been shown before, its contents differently organised. Not by subject or date. By something else. He could see it in the way the folders were arranged on the cabinet's shelves: not alphabetically, not chronologically. By a logic that was hers alone.
She had known for three days because the Archive's oscillation monitoring equipment—older than the director's instruments, built to different specifications, calibrated by the builders' original documentation rather than Guild standard methodology—had been reading the Rift's secondary encoded layer since the day after Stage 1 activated.
She had not sent a note. She had waited for him to come.
She carried four folders from the inner room and set them on the table.
