Stages 1 and 2 activated on the first day.
No repair. No adjustment. No accumulated incompatibility to clear. The dormancy had preserved them the way cold preserved things—the connections were in the condition the builders had left them four hundred years ago, every junction at tolerance, every pathway clean. He activated Stage 1 in the early morning and felt the connection fire with the immediacy of something that had been waiting, not decaying. Then Stage 2. The link between them established in seconds.
The third entity felt Stage 1 activate. Then Stage 2. Its pressing changed.
Not urgency. Not the Vael's Crossing entity's flood of fourteen months releasing at once. Something quieter. The quality of something that had been waiting long enough that it had stopped expecting the wait to end, and now it had ended, and the recognition was arriving rather than the relief.
Soren's notebook was open before they left zone eighteen's access station.
