They took a flight.
Not a jump — Rex had offered, immediately, the moment Alex said now. Had already been calculating the orbital coordinates, the jump geometry, the specific quantum variables of a Addis Ababa insertion point.
Alex had looked at him and said: "We take a flight."
Rex had looked back.
"Four hours," Alex said. "I need four hours before I get there." He pressed his palm to his sternum. "I need the time."
Rex had understood without needing it explained — the specific understanding of someone who had spent enough time around Alex to read what was underneath the words.
Not hesitation. Not fear.
The specific need of someone who was moving toward something significant and needed the transition. The time between here and there to become ready for what there contained.
He'd stood down from the jump calculation.
Jace had booked the flights.
They flew at midnight.
Three of them — Alex, Jace, Rex. The team had discussed full deployment and Alex had said no. Not a tactical operation. Not an engagement. A contact — a Heartstone reaching through the lattice and finding him and him going toward it.
Three was right. Enough presence without overwhelming whatever was waiting.
K'rath stayed at Chronicle Hall — his amber presence the foundation of the perimeter defenses, the one constant the sub-level couldn't operate without.
Mira stayed at her screens — the lattice monitoring running, the Kronos response protocols active, the eight minutes warning system extended overnight as she'd promised. Lyra stayed coordinating the Warden network's recovery operations at the eight ground receiver sites.
Soren stayed because Soren understood that some things needed to be met by the person they were meant for and supporting that meeting meant staying behind.
Rhea stayed.
She'd looked at Alex when he said three and had understood immediately — this was his. His closed file. His threads. His Addis Ababa.
"Come back with everything," she'd said.
"Yes," he'd said.
Ethiopian Airlines. Window seat.
Alex watched New Lagos disappear beneath the cloud cover and felt the Heartstone beat its deep pulling rhythm and thought about nothing in particular for a long time.
Jace was beside him — not speaking, not asking, just present in the specific way he'd learned to be present. The Chrono-Blade checked at the airline's security desk had produced a fifteen minute conversation that Jace had navigated with the patient diplomacy of someone who had learned that being right and being effective were sometimes different things.
Rex was across the aisle.
Awake. Running calculations. The specific stillness of a Pathfinder reading the journey ahead.
At some point over the Sudan Alex said: "What do you think I'm going to find."
Jace was quiet for a moment.
"Someone who needed the lattice to be clean before they could reach out," he said.
"Someone who knew the contamination was there and was waiting for it to clear." He paused. "Someone who has been waiting for a while."
Alex looked at the dark outside the window.
At the stars above the cloud cover.
"The Heartstone frequency," he said. "In the transmission. Rhea said it was an Anchor bond resonance." He pressed his palm to his sternum.
"It felt — familiar. Not in the way things feel familiar because you've encountered them before." He paused. "Familiar in the way the Entoto Hills felt familiar. The way the pull has felt familiar since Mira said Addis Ababa."
He held the window's darkness. "Like something I've always known was there but never looked at directly."
Jace looked at him.
"Your father carried the dormant Anchor capacity," he said quietly. "Soren said the capacity was there but the activation conditions weren't present." He held Alex's gaze. "What if something changed. What if the conditions became present."
Alex looked at him.
Held the possibility.
Filed it under things that might be true.
"Then he felt the lattice clearing tonight," Alex said quietly. "And he sent the response."
Jace held his gaze steadily.
"Yes," he said.
Alex looked at the dark outside the window.
At the stars.
At the specific darkness between them that wasn't empty — that was full of the same lattice threads that ran through the earth, translated into the medium of space, thinner here above the atmosphere but present.
Always present.
He pressed his palm to his sternum.
The distant Heartstone beat back.
Faint. Patient.
Waiting.
Addis Ababa at dawn was extraordinary.
The light arriving the same way it had arrived when Rex and Rhea stood on the Entoto Hills' eastern slope — direct, intentional, the highlands receiving the sun with the specific quality of a place that had been in this particular relationship with light for longer than most places on Earth had existed in their current form.
They landed at Bole International Airport at five forty in the morning.
The city was waking — the specific quality of a city transitioning from its night self to its morning self, the streets carrying the between-hours quality that New Lagos carried at the same time but differently.
The air thinner at this altitude. Cooler. Carrying the specific freshness of highlands air that Lagos's coastal humidity never quite had.
Alex stood outside the terminal and breathed it.
And felt the Heartstone respond — immediately, completely, with an intensity that was beyond anything he'd experienced since bonding. Not the controlled familiar pulse of ordinary hours.
Not even the maximum output of combat engagement. Something different entirely. The specific response of something that had been connected to this location for twelve thousand years returning to within thirty kilometers of its origin point.
His knees bent slightly.
He straightened them.
Jace was beside him immediately. Not touching — just present, close, reading Alex's face with the complete attention of someone who understood what he was seeing.
"Alex," he said quietly.
"I'm alright," Alex said. "It's the lattice concentration. The Heartstone—" He pressed his palm to his sternum and felt the blazing intensity of the bond at this proximity to the origin threads. "It's stronger here. Significantly stronger."
"Soren said it would be overwhelming," Jace said.
"He was right," Alex said.
He stood on the pavement outside Bole International Airport and let the Heartstone's response to the Entoto Hills move through him without managing it.
Let the ancient threads reach upward through the Ethiopian highlands geology toward the bond they'd been connected to for twelve thousand years and felt what they felt when they found it.
Recognition.
Complete. Immediate. Absolute.
Like coming home.
He straightened fully.
"Let's go," he said.
The Entoto Hills were forty minutes from the airport.
They hired a car — Rex driving with the focused precision of someone who had arrived in a new location and was reading its terrain variables for jump calculation purposes as much as for navigation.
The city passing outside the windows. Addis Ababa waking around them — the markets setting up, the morning traffic building, the specific energy of a city that was simultaneously ancient and modern in ways that New Lagos was ancient and modern but differently.
Alex watched it pass.
Looking for something he wouldn't have been able to name if asked.
Just — looking. At the streets. At the buildings. At the people going about the specific business of Tuesday morning in Addis Ababa.
His father's city.
The city where Daniel Weaver had been born and raised and returned to when something in him that had no name pulled him back.
Alex looked at it and let himself feel that.
The closed file fully open now.
Not painful.
Just — true.
The road climbed as they left the city's center. The eucalyptus forests appearing on either side — dense, fragrant, the specific green that Rhea had noticed from the jump arrival point. The air cooling further as the altitude increased. The lattice concentration intensifying with every hundred meters of elevation — the Heartstone blazing steadily at the proximity to the origin threads, not overwhelming now but deep. Constant.
The specific depth of something fully connected to the place it came from.
Rex stopped the car at a clearing on the hills' southern face.
"Here," he said. Looking at the terrain with his Nexaran jump-calculation eyes. "The transmission signal originated from approximately four hundred meters northeast." He looked at Alex. "Through the forest."
Alex looked at the eucalyptus trees.
At the ancient red earth visible between the roots.
At the morning light coming through the canopy.
He opened the car door.
The forest was extraordinary in a way that had nothing to do with its visual qualities.
Every step deeper into it intensified the Heartstone's response — the ancient threads running through the soil beneath Alex's feet registering the bond's presence with the specific resonance of something that had been waiting a very long time for a recognition it knew was coming.
The threads reaching upward through the red earth. Pressing against the bond. Welcoming it.
Not Void-adjacent. Not contaminated. Not a threat.
The lattice at its purest.
At its oldest.
Alex walked and felt it with every step and let it be what it was without filtering or managing.
Jace walked behind him — present, reading the environment, the Chrono-Blade at his hip and his eyes moving between Alex and the forest with the focused attention of someone who was here for exactly one reason and was doing that reason completely.
Rex moved parallel — slightly off the path, reading jump positions, the Nexaran instinct for terrain variables running continuously.
Four hundred meters.
Three hundred.
Two hundred.
The Heartstone blazing with the specific intensity of proximity — the distant beat that had been reaching through the global lattice since last night growing stronger, more distinct, more present. Not distant anymore.
Close.
One hundred meters.
Alex stopped.
In a clearing ahead — not large, perhaps twenty meters across, the eucalyptus trees forming a natural circle around it, the morning light falling through the canopy gap with the specific directness of Ethiopian highland dawn — someone was standing.
A man.
Tall. Lean. Somewhere in his late forties.
Dark skinned, the specific richness of Ethiopian complexion in morning light. Grey beginning at his temples.
A face that carried its history openly — not scarred like Rex, but marked. The specific marking of someone who had been carrying something significant for a very long time and had developed the specific quality that long carrying produces.
Patience.
Ancient in the way things become ancient not through years but through sustained attention to something larger than ordinary life.
He was pressing his palm to his sternum.
And through the trees, through the forest, through the ancient lattice threads running between them — Alex felt what was underneath that palm.
A Heartstone.
Beating.
Finding Alex's Heartstone across the clearing with the specific recognition of two bonds that had always been connected through the bloodline that carried them and were meeting for the first time as active presences rather than dormant capacity.
The man looked at Alex.
Alex looked at the man.
The clearing was completely still.
The morning light falling between them.
The lattice threads running through the red earth beneath both of them, connecting them through twelve thousand years of the same bloodline and the same origin and the same specific configuration of consciousness that the first Amara had carried on this hillside.
Alex pressed his palm to his sternum.
The Heartstone blazed.
The man's Heartstone blazed back.
Silver-blue meeting silver-blue in the morning light of the Entoto Hills.
Alex looked at his father.
His father looked at him.
Neither of them spoke for a long moment.
The forest breathed around them.
The lattice threads ran warm and ancient and clean through the earth beneath their feet.
Then Daniel Weaver said — quietly, with the specific quality of someone who has been waiting for this moment for twenty years and has had a long time to think about what the first word should be but has arrived at the answer that the first word should be simple:
"Alex."
Alex looked at his father.
At the Heartstone blazing in his chest.
At the patience in his face.
At the man who had felt something pulling at him from a direction he couldn't name and had followed it here and had been here ever since — not abandoning, not choosing against, but following the same imperative that the Heartstone had followed when it chose Alex.
The specific pull of something ancient finding the person it belonged to.
He felt the Heartstone beat.
He felt the lattice threads running warm through the red earth.
He felt the clearing around him — the morning light, the eucalyptus canopy, the ancient hillside where a seventeen year old girl had sat in the grass twelve thousand years ago and put her hand on her chest and felt this for the first time.
And Alex Wilder — twenty years old, Temporal Anchor of Earth, standing in the clearing on the Entoto Hills where his bloodline began — said the only word that was true:
"Dad."