The fish was very good.
Yuki had ordered something she couldn't pronounce by pointing at it on the menu with complete confidence, and it had arrived looking nothing like she expected and tasting better than that, and she'd spent the first three bites completely silent which was always the real review.
"Well?" he said.
She pointed at her plate. He waited. "It's the best thing I've eaten since the schnitzel," she said. "Which was the best thing I'd eaten since the ramen. Which was the best thing I'd eaten since—"
"Everything is the best thing you've eaten."
"Everything keeps being better than the last thing!" She gestured with her fork. "That's not my fault. The world has a lot of food in it and I've only been alive for eight months." She looked at his plate. "How's yours?"
"Good."
"More specific."
"Very good."
She reached over and stole a piece without asking. He watched her eat it. She nodded seriously. "Also very good," she confirmed, and went back to her own plate.
The restaurant was small and warm — stone walls, low ceiling, the kind of place that had been keeping Icelanders alive through winters for a very long time. Through the window the harbour was visible, the coloured buildings, the mountains. The seagull had followed them for half a block before giving up.
"Kairo," she said.
"Mm."
"Eleven nodes."
"Yes."
"We've been doing two per trip." She moved food around her plate, thinking. "At this pace—"
"Five more trips," he said. "Roughly."
"That's a lot of flights."
"Yes."
She looked at the window. At the harbour outside. "The accumulation files," she said. "The ones the archive is saving. The wilderness node was four months — what about the others? How long have some of these gates been open?"
He thought about it. The government feed, the gate timeline, the ones that had appeared early and sat uncleared because nobody could reach them. "The Sea of Japan gate," he said. "The fishing vessel went silent in the first week. That gate has been open since the crash."
She looked at him. "That's eight months."
"Yes."
"Eight months of accumulation." She put her fork down. "If the wilderness node at four months redirected to the archive queue — an eight-month node would—"
"Would be significantly larger," he said.
She absorbed this. "What floor is the Sea of Japan gate?"
"Seventies. The vessel didn't get close enough to confirm the exact number before it went silent."
"So we'd have to go in to know." She picked her fork back up. "And whatever's in there has been accumulating for eight months and when we find the node—"
"The vision would be very large," he said. "Yes."
She was quiet for a moment. He watched her work through it — not afraid, just measuring. That was one of the things about her. She measured things rather than reacting to them, which he'd noticed early and had never stopped noticing.
"We should do the smaller accumulations first," she said. "Work up to the big ones while the sequence stabilises."
"That's what I've been doing," he said.
She looked at him. "You've been sequencing them deliberately."
"The recently opened gates first. The long-running ones later." He looked at his plate. "The sequence needs to be stable enough to absorb the larger releases without—"
"Without us being non-functional afterward," she said.
"Yes."
She looked at him for a moment with the expression she had when he'd done something she hadn't noticed he was doing. "You planned that without telling me," she said.
"I'm telling you now."
"You keep doing that."
"You keep asking me to tell you things in advance," he said. "I'm working on the timing."
She stared at him. He ate his fish. She opened her mouth and then closed it and picked up her fork and ate too, and he could see from the set of her mouth that she was deciding whether to pursue it and deciding not to, which meant she agreed with the approach and wasn't going to admit it.
"Eleven nodes," she said, after a while. "Which ones are next."
He pulled out his phone and opened the gate map. She leaned across the table immediately, craning to see. He turned it toward her.
Three gates flagged — one in New Zealand, one in Morocco, one in Northern Japan near the coast. All recently opened, all manageable floor levels, all with timelines that weren't urgent but weren't comfortable either.
"New Zealand," she said immediately.
He looked at her.
"It's supposed to be beautiful," she said. "And it's near Australia so the flight isn't — Kairo don't look at me like that, the floor level matters too."
"Floor 41," he said.
"See! Reasonable!" She sat back. "Also beautiful."
"Morocco is Floor 39."
"Also reasonable." She looked at the map. "Northern Japan is Floor 52 and it's close to home."
"The Northern Japan gate has been open for six weeks," he said. "Longer than Morocco or New Zealand."
"So Northern Japan first," she said.
"Yes."
"And then New Zealand."
He looked at her.
"And Morocco," she said. "Obviously Morocco too. I'm not skipping Morocco."
He put his phone away. She was watching him with the expression she had when she'd gotten what she wanted and was trying not to look like it.
"When we get back," he said.
"Tomorrow?"
"Day after. We just cleared two gates."
She looked at him. He looked back at her and didn't move. She absorbed the day after with the composure of someone accepting reasonable terms. "One day," she said. "At home."
"One day."
"With food."
"We have food."
"Good food. From the place."
"The ramen place is always open," he said.
She smiled — small and satisfied — and went back to her fish, and he watched her eat with the focused happiness she brought to things she'd decided were good, and the Reykjavik harbour moved in the grey outside the window, and he thought about eleven nodes and a queue of accumulations and a locked file waiting for enough pressure to open.
One thing at a time.
The flight back was long.
They connected through London — a layover, four hours, which Yuki spent approximately twenty minutes sleeping through before waking up and deciding the airport needed to be investigated.
He followed her through three terminals.
She had opinions about airport food. Extensive, considered opinions delivered with the seriousness of someone doing genuine research. She tried four things from four different places, assessed each one with focused attention, reported findings.
"That one," she said, pointing back at a place two terminals ago.
"We're not going back two terminals."
"I know. I'm just saying that one was the best." She looked at her current purchase — a pastry of some kind, London airport's contribution to her ongoing survey. "This one is also good."
"You've said that about all of them."
"They were all good! Some were better." She ate the pastry. "The Icelandic fish was the best thing today."
"The Icelandic fish was in Iceland."
"I'm aware of where we ate it." She finished the pastry and looked around the terminal — the people, the shops, the high ceilings, the specific non-place quality of airports that existed the same everywhere. "Kairo."
"Mm."
"Do you think about the archive?"
"Constantly."
"No I mean—" she leaned against him, shoulder to shoulder, watching people move through the terminal. "Do you think about what it means that they found me. Not what I am — what it means that someone found something and kept it. For twelve years. Before the game, before the crash, before any of this." She paused. "That's a long time to keep a secret."
"Yes," he said.
"They sent the message," she said. "We suggest you hurry. That's not nothing — that means they want the sequence to complete. They want us to open the file."
"Or they want us to finish what they started," he said.
She looked at him. "That's different."
"Slightly."
She thought about it. "If they built the game to get you to me — and the game also opened the gates when it crashed—" she stopped. "Was that intentional?"
He'd thought about this. Over the Pacific, in various hotel rooms, on various planes. "I don't know," he said honestly. "The crash could have been the planned endpoint. The game completed its purpose — I reached the hundredth floor, found you, used the reward. Server crash, abilities transfer, gates open." He paused. "Or the crash was unplanned and the gates were a consequence they didn't intend."
"Or the gates were always part of it," she said. "The nodes are in the gates. You can't access the nodes without clearing the gates. The whole system is connected."
He looked at her.
She looked back at him. "Someone planned all of this," she said. "The game, the crash, the gates, the nodes, the archive. All of it." A beat. "To do what?"
He didn't have the answer. She could see that.
"Open the file," she said, to herself. "That's what happens when we finish. We open the file and whatever they built all of this to show us — we see it."
"Yes," he said.
She was quiet for a long moment. Around them the airport moved, indifferent, a thousand people going to a thousand places. He put his arm around her and she leaned into it.
"Eleven nodes," she said.
"Eleven," he said.
"We're going to find all of them."
"Yes."
She looked up at him. "And whatever it shows us — whoever built this and why and whatever I am—" she held his gaze, "—we see it together."
"Together," he said. Not reassurance. Fact.
She nodded once. Then she leaned her head on his shoulder and watched the airport move and he kept his arm around her and they sat in the London layover like two people who had nowhere better to be, which wasn't true but felt like it was.
His phone buzzed.
He looked at it. Government feed — new gate flagged. Not Japan, not New Zealand, not Morocco.
Mumbai. Floor 77. Appeared six hours ago.
He looked at the floor number. At the timeline. At the map showing the gate's position in one of the most densely populated cities on the planet.
Yuki was reading over his arm. He felt her go still.
"Seventy-seven," she said.
"Yes."
"That's—"
"Big," he said.
She looked at the screen. At the city. At the floor number. "Our day at home," she said.
"Still happening," he said. "Mumbai can wait forty-eight hours."
She looked at him. "Are you sure?"
"Floor 77 with a fresh opening has time," he said. "The timeline won't be critical for at least a week." He put the phone away. "We go home. One day. Then Northern Japan, then Mumbai, then New Zealand."
She held his gaze for a second. Then she settled back against his shoulder. "Okay," she said.
He looked at the gate on his phone one more time before pocketing it.
Floor 77. The second highest they'd taken. Whatever was inside had been sitting in a Mumbai street for six hours and would sit there for two more days and then he'd clear it in whatever time it took and that would be that.
He put his arm back around her.
The London airport went on moving around them, entirely unaware of any of this, which was exactly right.