Twelve months after the wellspring opened the world aggregate cost was at fifty-three.
Oren announced this on a Tuesday morning.
Not dramatically — the Cost Sense running at its ambient sensitivity, the daily reading a routine part of the network's operational data. The number arrived the way accurate measurements arrived: quietly, specifically, without commentary.
Fifty-three.
He was at the oversight board session when Oren's message came through the threading network.
His mother was chairing.
He set the message on the table without interrupting the session — which was covering the sixth retroactive review case from the territories outside the kingdom, the first cases from the wellspring-adjacent territories where the oversight board model had been established through the school's graduates and where Hael's framework was being applied to the historical institutional harm.
The session ran its full course.
After, in the kitchen, his mother made tea and looked at the number.
