Reiko opened the door.
Not Kenji — Reiko, who had handled forty-three transit families and their associated complications over thirty years and who had, accordingly, developed a practiced and credible version of an entirely ordinary sixty-year-old woman answering the door of a house on a quiet street in Chiyoda.
The man on the doorstep looked at her. She looked at him. The mutual assessment lasted approximately three seconds, which is about the right amount of time for two people of equivalent intelligence to register that neither of them is going to be fooled.
"Tanaka Kenji," Reiko said. "From the geological survey report."
"You read the reports," he said. It was not a question.
"We track everything that comes near the addresses."
"We."
"Come in," Reiko said, which answered the question as much as anything could. "Take your shoes off. I'll put the kettle on."
In the basement, Kenji — the transit Kenji, the one who had come through the portal — sat on a crate of Reiko's filing and listened to the sounds from above. Footsteps: two sets. The kettle running. Chairs. The specific sound of a conversation that was being conducted carefully, in the way of two people who have committed to honesty and are discovering that honesty requires more precision than lying.
Aiko was beside him. She had her hand on his arm — not a gesture of comfort, exactly; more the physical equivalent of standing close enough to be counted.
"He's going to figure it out," Riku said, from the corner of the basement where he'd been sitting with his back against the wall and his knees up. "Whatever Reiko tells him. He's going to reach the conclusion himself."
"I know," Kenji said.
"What happens then?"
"Then we'll know what happens."
The other-Riku — Keisuke — was sitting on the basement stairs in the middle distance between the family and the door, which was, Kenji had begun to notice, the position he defaulted to: always adjacent to the group, always maintaining the option of the door. It was not unfriendliness. It was the posture of someone who had spent eight months in a world where he wasn't quite sure he belonged anywhere anymore.
"What was your dad like?" Hana asked him, from across the basement. She asked it the way she asked all the things she actually wanted to know: without preamble, without softening, in the direct tone of someone who respects the person they're asking enough to not pretend the question is something less than it is.
Keisuke looked at her. He was getting used to Hana. It had taken a few hours, which was shorter than he'd expected.
"Like him," he said, nodding upward — meaning the man in the kitchen, meaning the transit Kenji. "But — I think — further along. He'd been doing the portal work for an extra year, and the year had done something to him. He was less — contained. He explained things more. He told me once that he'd spent the first two years not telling anyone anything and it had cost everyone something, and he'd decided the cost was too high."
"Did it work? The telling?"
"It worked for me. I think it was still in progress with Mum." He paused. "She was — she handled it. You know how she handles things. She just handles them."
Aiko heard this from beside her husband and smiled, a small private smile that she didn't direct at anyone, just let happen.
"Was Hana — the other Hana —" Keisuke stopped himself. "I keep trying to ask about people who are simultaneously here and not here. It's strange."
"She's right here," Hana said. "You can ask directly."
Keisuke looked at her. "Were you —" He thought about how to say it. "Were you okay? After the trials?"
"Define okay."
"I mean —" He spread his hands, a gesture of inadequacy. "The forest. Thirty-one years, subjectively, even though your body is thirteen. Did it — how are you carrying that?"
Hana thought about this with the serious attention she gave all questions worth answering. "I didn't do thirty-one years," she said. "Mei did. I was only in the forest for the time it took to find her. But — Sora did. And watching what it cost Sora has changed the way I think about time."
"How?"
"It makes ordinary time feel more serious. Each minute has more weight to it, because I've seen what it looks like when minutes stop being ordinary."
Keisuke absorbed this.
Ren, who had been quietly organizing Reiko's crates into a more logical system because he was apparently the kind of person who organized things when he was anxious, said without looking up: "My sister used to say something like that. 'Every minute you're somewhere is a minute that didn't happen differently.' She said it when I wanted to leave the house too fast and she thought I should slow down."
Mei looked at him from the corner.
Ren didn't look back. But his hands stilled on the crate he was moving.
From above: the scrape of chairs. Footsteps moving from the kitchen toward the main room. The sound of a door — not the front door, the interior door from the main room into the hallway. Moving closer.
The basement door opened.
Reiko leaned down the stairs. Her expression was the one she used when she'd managed a situation successfully and was slightly smug about it but not going to perform the smugness. "He wants to see the files," she said.
"Which files?"
"The full transit records. He's understood the system. All of it, in approximately twenty-five minutes of conversation." A pause. "He's angry."
"About what?"
"About the people he didn't know about. About his city having a system running under it for thirty years that he was never told about. He said — and I'm quoting — that a system of this nature, operating in the geological substrate of a populated urban area, had effects on the local resonance profile that should have been disclosed and the fact that it wasn't disclosed suggests that whoever designed it was more interested in getting it built than in maintaining the trust of the people it was built next to."
The basement was silent.
"That's fair," Kenji said.
"Yes. He also said something else."
"What?"
— ✦ —
Reiko's expression shifted. Something in it became less managed and more present, the way a face goes when it carries news that it hasn't yet decided how to carry. "He said: I had three pages of a notebook that I stopped filling. And looking at your system documentation, I can see where the notebooks connect — mine and whoever built this. The frequency I was picking up from my study three years ago was not a miscalculation. It was this." She paused. "And then he said: which means the timeline I live in has whatever the other one had. Some version of what they were running from. And I want to know — he was very clear about this, he wants to know — what is underneath my city." Kenji looked at his family. His family looked at him. He thought: a version of me in a safe world, who never built the notebook because he never had a reason to, who has been quietly picking up resonance for years and made three pages of calculation and stopped — has now reached the same place I did. The beginning. The math that doesn't add up to anything you want to follow to its conclusion. He thought: I could leave him there. I could tell him nothing and let him go home to his safe world and his safe study and his three pages of stopped calculation. He knew, even as he thought it, that he wouldn't.