The crowd had been waiting for hours.
It had started as curiosity — the gate closing, the novelty of a live tower challenge, the particular appetite of a frontier city for something to make an afternoon meaningful. It had grown into investment as the hours passed, the betting pool deepening, the theories multiplying, the crowd developing the specific communal personality that crowds develop when they've been waiting long enough to start feeling like a community.
And then, gradually, without anyone announcing it, the mood had shifted.
Not all at once. The way certainty settles in a crowd — person to person, the same way news travels, except in reverse. Not information arriving but hope quietly, collectively, being revised downward.
The gate was still sealed.
Three had come out. One hadn't.
