Three months had passed since the observatory deck gathering that closed Volume 3's long accounting—three months of the specific, hard-won ordinariness that Timeline 48 had spent seven years learning to protect. Rama and Sekar's anniversary celebration had settled into memory rather than remaining an event requiring processing. Nakamura's engagement to Jin-ho occupied the pleasant, unhurried space of a couple beginning to plan something without urgency. The entity civilization's Ambassador-equivalent process continued its careful, collaborative development. Threnody did not yet exist as a word anyone in this story knew.
It was, by every measure that mattered, a good season.
Which was precisely why Dr. Sarah Chen's message reached Rama at 0640 on a Tuesday with the specific weight of something that had waited overnight before being escalated, rather than something that had demanded immediate response.
