The penthouse was warm when they got back.
Yuki went straight to the plant — checked the soil, turned the pot slightly toward the light, spoke to it briefly in a tone too low for him to catch. He watched her from the doorway with his coat still on.
"What are you telling it," he said.
"That we were gone two days and it did well." She straightened up. "Positive reinforcement."
"It's a plant."
"It's our plant." She turned around. "It deserves acknowledgment."
He looked at the plant. Looked at her. Decided not to pursue it.
She crossed to him and started unwrapping his scarf — the Vancouver-damp one that had dried on the flight and still smelled faintly of harbour water. He stood still and let her. She folded it over her arm and looked up at him.
"Sleep," she said.
"The archive—"
"Sleep first." She put her hand flat on his chest and pushed — not hard, directional. "You didn't sleep on the plane."
"I was thinking."
"I know. You can think after you sleep." She pushed again. "Go."
He looked at her hand on his chest. Looked at her face. "You're very small to be pushing me anywhere."
"And yet here you are, moving." She raised her eyebrows.
He was, in fact, moving. Slightly. He stopped. She pushed again and he let himself be pushed because it was easier than arguing and also because she was right and he was tired and the thinking had reached a point of diminishing returns somewhere over the Pacific.
He slept for four hours.
She was at the desk when he woke up, laptop open, the archive loaded, a half-eaten piece of toast on a plate beside her. He lay still for a moment and watched her from across the room — the white hair loose, the properly-sized hoodie, both feet pulled up onto the chair, reading with the focused stillness she brought to things she was actually thinking about.
She turned a page without looking up. "You're awake."
"Breathing again?"
"You stopped doing the sleep breathing." She did look up then. "Better?"
"Yes." He sat up. "What are you reading?"
"The new file. The one from Vancouver." She turned the laptop toward him as he came to the desk. "There's a section I keep coming back to."
He sat beside her and read where she was pointing.
The original discovery — twelve years ago — had been geological. Not digital, not code-based. Something physical, found during excavation work in an unspecified location. The documentation described it as an energy signature with no known source, behaving in ways that contradicted every existing framework. Consistent. Stable. Responding to proximity.
Responding to proximity.
"It reacted to people being near it," Yuki said.
"Specific people," he said. "Or it would have been found long before twelve years ago."
"Someone walked past it and it did something." She looked at the screen. "And they built a game around making sure you'd walk past me."
He read the paragraph again. The clinical language, the dry notation — and underneath it the shape of something enormous, something that had been sitting in the ground responding to proximity for God knows how long before anyone found it.
"What am I," she said. Quietly. Not for the first time. But differently this time — less afraid of the answer, more tired of not having it.
He put his arm around her. She leaned into him automatically.
"We'll get there," he said.
"Thirteen nodes," she said.
"Thirteen nodes," he agreed.
She looked at the synchronisation counter. 12%. "It feels slow."
"Two nodes a trip is not slow."
"It feels slow," she said again, which meant it wasn't about the pace, it was about the waiting. He understood that. He'd spent seventeen years being exceptionally patient and still found the particular frustration of almost-knowing worse than not knowing at all.
His phone buzzed.
Government feed — new gate flagged, high priority. He read it and turned the screen toward her.
Melbourne, Australia. Floor 58. Urban centre, significant pull radius, local population still partially within cordon zone despite evacuation orders. Timeline: four days before structural breach of the containment perimeter.
Yuki read it. "Four days."
"We can be there tomorrow."
"Melbourne in November is summer," she said. "Southern hemisphere."
He looked at her.
"I'm just noting it," she said. "Summer. Different. We'd need different clothes."
"We just bought coats."
"For Canada! Canada was cold!" She gestured at the window where November Tokyo was doing its grey thing outside. "Australia is going to be completely different and I want to be prepared."
He looked at her for a long moment.
"One item," he said.
"Two."
"One."
"A shirt and—"
"One," he said.
She looked at the ceiling. "Fine. One." Then immediately: "Can the one be a dress?"
"It can be whatever you want as long as it's one."
She typed something on her phone with the speed of someone who had already been thinking about this. He looked at the plant. Looked at the archive. Looked back at her typing.
"You already knew what you wanted," he said.
"I was prepared," she said, without looking up. "That's different."
The shopping was brief because he'd said one item and she'd taken that seriously, which surprised him until he watched her in the shop — she went directly to what she wanted, picked it up, held it out to him.
White. Of course white. A light dress, simple, nothing like the robes but the same instinct underneath.
"Well?" she said.
"It's white."
"We're the Eternal Ones," she said. "It's on brand." She turned it around and looked at it. "Also it's pretty."
He looked at it. At her holding it. "Get it," he said.
She got it.
Outside the shop she tucked herself under his arm in the November cold and he pulled her in and they walked. She had the bag in her other hand and was swinging it slightly, which she did when she was in a good mood, which she usually was, which was one of the things about her he'd stopped noticing because it was just always true.
"Kairo," she said.
"Mm."
"What do you think the locked file actually says."
He'd thought about this. He'd thought about it extensively over the Pacific. "I think it says what she is," he said. "Not what the archive found — what she actually is. Where she comes from. Why the synchronisation exists." He paused. "Why it's always us."
Yuki was quiet for a moment. "The visions," she said. "Every version — it ends badly."
"Not this one," he said.
She looked up at him. "Not this one," she agreed softly.
He stopped walking and turned toward her and kissed her there on the pavement in the November cold and she made the sound and her free hand came up to his jaw and the bag swung forgotten from her other hand. When he pulled back her ears were red from the cold or something else and her eyes were bright.
"What was that for," she said.
"The same reason as always," he said, which wasn't an answer and was entirely an answer, and she looked at him for a second and then smiled — the full one — and tucked back under his arm.
"Not this one," she said again, quiet.
"Not this one," he said.
The government contact called at four.
Kairo had it on speaker. Yuki was on the couch with the laptop, one leg dangling, looking at the gate map.
"Melbourne is priority one," the contact said. "But there's a secondary flag — Reykjavik. Iceland. Floor 44. Appeared overnight."
"Timeline?" Kairo said.
"Ten days. Less urgent than Melbourne but the location is isolated and Iceland's response teams have no viable path past Floor 20."
Yuki held up two fingers without looking away from the screen. He looked at her. She pointed at the map — Melbourne, then Iceland, a line between them.
"We'll take both," he said. "Melbourne first."
"We can have a flight ready—"
"Tomorrow morning," he said. "We need one day."
A pause. "Of course."
He hung up. Yuki had already updated something on the map.
"Iceland in winter," she said.
"Yes."
"That's going to be extremely cold."
"You have a coat."
"I have a Canada coat. Iceland might require a different—"
"Yuki."
"I'm just flagging it," she said, with tremendous innocence.
He looked at the ceiling briefly. She watched him do it with the expression she had when she'd won something before the argument started.
"One item," he said.
"Obviously," she said, and went back to the map, and he sat beside her and put his arm around her and she leaned in automatically and they looked at the red dots together — Melbourne, Reykjavik, and eleven others somewhere in those forty-three gates that had a white room and a figure with her face and fourteen percent of something he was going to understand eventually.
"We're going to get them all," she said.
"Yes," he said.
"And then we open the file."
"Yes."
She turned and looked at him up close. "And whatever it says—"
"It doesn't change this," he said, before she finished.
She held his gaze. "No," she said. "It doesn't."
He pressed his lips to her forehead and kept them there and she closed her eyes and the city outside did its November thing and the plant was in its window and the archive was on the laptop and thirteen answers were sitting in thirteen gates across the world waiting patiently.
They had time.
They always found each other.