She read all of it.
Then she said: "Tell me about Freda."
Not the working. Not the eighty thousand. Not the council implications or the Ashvale dismantling or the logistical aftermath of a three-month working's collapse.
Freda.
Because Freda was the first question. Always the first question. Everything else could be addressed in sequence, and the sequence would be long and difficult and she was already planning it, because that was what she did, because the thousand years of experience had made planning the automatic response to any complex situation.
But Freda was first.
Satou told her what Jessica had found — the standing temporal effect, the pathways that regrew and immediately aged to nothing, the permanent self-reinforcing decay.
