Chapter 75: His Father's War

Director Mikhail Petrov arrived at the Night Library carrying a leather satchel and the bearing of a man who had spent sixty years watching the world's edges and was now, for the first time, stepping past them.

He was smaller than Jack expected. The Vigil's North American director was five-six, compact, silver-haired, with a face that belonged on a retired professor rather than the leader of a seven-hundred-year-old supernatural monitoring organization. He wore a gray suit. No tie. Wire-rimmed glasses that he removed, cleaned, and replaced four times during his first hour in the building—a nervous habit, or a tic, or a way of buying time while his eyes adjusted to the Night Library's particular atmosphere.

Petrov's eyes. That was the thing Jack noticed first. The man's eyes had the same quality as Voronova's—the deep-seated shimmer that marked someone who lived at two frequencies, whose body existed in both the physical world and the barrier's resonance simultaneously. But where Voronova's shimmer was active, restless, the product of an ongoing struggle between frequencies, Petrov's was settled. Calm. The shimmer of a man who'd stopped fighting the dual existence decades ago and had simply... incorporated it.

He spoke English with a Czech accent that flattened his vowels and sharpened his consonants. He shook Santos's hand. Nodded to Jack. Studied Cross's butcher-paper diagram for three silent minutes before turning to Cross and saying, "You are the one who solved the standing wave."

"I applied a medieval text to modern topology data," Cross said. "The solution was in the framework. I merely performed the calculation."

"Seven hundred years," Petrov said. "Seven hundred years of data collection. Monitoring. Measurement. And the framework was in a book that our archives classified as folklore in 1847." He removed his glasses. Cleaned them. Replaced them. "We owe you an apology, Mr. Cross. Several centuries of apology."

"You owe me nothing. But I will accept access to your historical data."

Petrov opened his satchel. Inside were seven folders—physical folders, paper, the Vigil's operational records rendered in analog because digital systems could be hacked and the barrier between worlds was not something you stored on a server.

"Full monitoring data for all thirteen nodes," Petrov said. "Current status, historical fluctuation patterns, and the Hunger's observed behavior at each position over the past eighteen months. Additionally—" He produced a thicker folder. Worn. The leather cover cracked at the spine. "The Vigil's complete shepherd registry. Every documented case of barrier adaptation in our records. Forty-three individuals over seven centuries."

Cross's hands stopped trembling. The scholar faced with primary sources—the antiquarian's equivalent of a heart attack, the sudden rush of blood to the brain that came from touching documents that nobody else had seen.

"Forty-three shepherds," Cross said. His voice had dropped to the register he used when discussing rare texts—reverent, hushed, the voice of a man in the presence of irreplaceable knowledge. "The Threshold mentions only seven."

"The Threshold was written in the fourteenth century. Thirty-six of the forty-three cases occurred after its composition." Petrov set the registry on the table. "The earliest documented shepherd: Prague, 1284. The most recent before your detective: Edinburgh, 1971. Average interval between shepherds: approximately sixteen years. Average duration of adaptation process: forty to sixty days. Average survival rate post-adaptation—" Petrov paused. Cleaned his glasses. "—fourteen percent."

The number dropped into the room.

Fourteen percent. Of forty-three shepherds, six had survived the adaptation. Six had crossed the threshold at 7.83 hertz and continued to exist as functional human beings. Thirty-seven had not. Some had gone mad. Some had simply stopped—their hearts ceasing to beat as their cellular resonance overshot the barrier's frequency and entered the range beyond. Some had survived the threshold but been destroyed by the Hunger, which targeted completed shepherds with a specific, focused aggression that Petrov described as "territorial."

"The Hunger recognizes completed shepherds as threats," Petrov said. "A shepherd at 7.83 hertz can perceive the barrier's full architecture. Can interact with the network. Can, in theory, reinforce or restructure the membrane through their resonance alone. The Hunger does not permit this. Every completed shepherd in our records was targeted within days of reaching threshold. The six survivors—" He indicated the registry. "—survived because they had support structures. Communities. Organizations that recognized what they were and protected them during the vulnerable post-threshold period."

"Like the Vigil," Santos said.

"In two cases, yes. The Vigil sheltered completed shepherds in Prague and in Lisbon. Both survived for decades. Both contributed significantly to the barrier's maintenance in their regions. The remaining four survivors had other support systems—religious orders, family networks, indigenous spiritual communities."

"What about the thirty-seven who didn't make it?" Jack asked.

"Most were alone. Isolated. They experienced the adaptation without understanding what was happening to them. Without anyone to explain that the voices in their heads were real, that the things they saw were genuine, that their bodies were not betraying them but becoming something necessary." Petrov looked at Jack. The director's shimmering eyes carrying a particular weight—the look of a man who'd read thirty-seven files about people who'd died because nobody told them they weren't crazy. "You are fortunate, Detective. You have what most shepherds never had. Knowledge. Context. A team. The cage, the Choir, the wards—these are unprecedented support structures. The previous shepherds had none of them."

Cross had opened the registry. His ink-stained fingers turning pages with the delicate care of a man handling documents that were older than his country. Each page a shepherd's file—name, date, location, duration of adaptation, outcome. Handwritten entries spanning centuries, the penmanship shifting from medieval script to modern print as the registry moved through time.

Jack watched Cross read. The scholar's eyes moving through the pages with increasing speed, consuming seven centuries of data the way a drowning man consumes air—desperate, vital, the information feeding something in Cross's understanding that had been starving.

Cross stopped.

His fingers held a page open. His eyes fixed on an entry near the bottom—not the oldest, not the most recent, but an entry somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century. His face changed. The scholar's eager consumption of data shifted to something else—a stillness that Jack recognized, the specific cessation of movement that happened when Cross encountered information that was significant enough to require complete attention.

"Detective," Cross said. His voice was careful. The antiquarian's precision deployed not for academic accuracy but for emotional navigation—the particular care of a man who'd found something that was going to hurt. "What was your father's name?"

The question hit Jack's chest before his brain processed it. A physical impact—the kind of question that you feel in your body before you understand with your mind.

"Robert," Jack said. "Robert Morrow."

Cross looked at Petrov. The director met his gaze. Something passed between them—a confirmation, a shared understanding of what the page said.

"Show me," Jack said.

Cross turned the registry toward him.

The entry was handwritten. Neat block letters—the Vigil's standardized recording format, impersonal by design, the facts of a person's life reduced to data points in an organizational archive.

**SHEPHERD #39**

**Name:** Robert James Morrow

**Location:** New York metropolitan area

**First contact:** 1974 (age 23)

**Adaptation onset:** September 1982

**Adaptation duration:** 47 days

**Peak frequency achieved:** 7.81 Hz

**Outcome:** Terminated. Self-inflicted. November 12, 1982.

**Notes:** Subject presented with auditory perception of deceased individuals from childhood. Gift consistent with shepherd characteristics but unconfirmed by Vigil contact until 1980. Subject was hostile to Vigil approach. Refused monitoring. Refused support. Believed his perceptions to be psychological pathology. Subject's adaptation was triggered by proximity to Node Seven (Henderson Station) during a barrier fluctuation event. Adaptation progressed without subject's understanding or cooperation. Subject exhibited classic adaptation syndrome: declining heart rate, visual perception shifts, frequency-dependent cellular changes. Subject's final recorded frequency was 7.81 Hz—0.02 below threshold. Subject self-terminated two days before projected adaptation completion.

**Vigil assessment:** Subject lacked framework for understanding adaptation process. Interpreted physical and perceptual changes as progressive mental illness. No support structure in place. Subject's wife reported increasing withdrawal, paranoid behavior, and references to "hearing people who weren't there" in the weeks preceding death. Subject left no note. Vigil records indicate the subject's son (b. 1979) exhibited nascent auditory perception at age 3, confirming hereditary gift transmission.

Jack read it twice.

The first time, the words were symbols. Marks on a page. Data in a format that his detective's training processed automatically—subject, dates, outcome, assessment. A case file. The kind of document he'd read ten thousand times in his career. The neutral language of organizations that recorded human tragedy in standardized paragraphs.

The second time, the words had weight.

Robert James Morrow. His father. Not a weak man who'd given up. Not a coward who'd abandoned his family. Not the man Jack had spent thirty-nine years being angry at for dying—for leaving, for choosing death over his wife and his three-year-old son, for walking into the garage and starting the car and closing the door and being found by Jack's mother at 6 AM on a November morning.

A shepherd.

A man who could hear the dead. Who had been hearing them since childhood—the same age Jack's gift emerged, the same inexplicable voices, the same decades of managing a perception that nobody else shared. A man whose body had begun to change in September 1982—the same cellular adaptation, the same frequency shift, the same slow metamorphosis from living human to something that bridged the barrier between worlds.

A man who didn't know what was happening to him.

A man who thought he was losing his mind.

Jack's hands were steady. His face was steady. His body was a forty-seven-year-old detective's body, trained by twenty years of homicide work to maintain composure when confronted with the worst things human beings did to each other. But inside that composure, inside the detective's professional armor, something was cracking. Not breaking—cracking. The way bedrock cracks when the ground shifts beneath it. Slow. Deep. The kind of fracture that changes the landscape.

"He was at 7.81," Jack said. "Two days from completing."

"Yes," Petrov said.

"He didn't know. He didn't know what was happening to him."

"The Vigil attempted contact in 1980. Two years before the adaptation onset. Your father—" Petrov's glasses came off. Were cleaned. Replaced. "Your father believed the Vigil contact was a delusion. A manifestation of the mental illness he believed he was developing. He refused all subsequent contact. Our watcher reported that your father became increasingly isolated in the months before the adaptation—withdrawn from family, from work, from social contact. The classic pattern of a shepherd experiencing the early stages of adaptation without the framework to understand it."

"He thought he was going crazy."

"He thought he was going crazy. And with the adaptation's physical symptoms—the declining heart rate, the visual disturbances, the perception of the dead becoming constant rather than intermittent—his belief was reinforced. Everything he experienced confirmed his worst fear. The voices were getting louder. The visions were getting clearer. His body was changing in ways his doctor couldn't explain. From his perspective, he was deteriorating. From our perspective—"

"He was almost there."

The registry page stared up from the table. **Outcome: Terminated. Self-inflicted.** The Vigil's clinical language for a man who'd killed himself because nobody told him that the thing destroying his life was actually trying to save it.

"Two days," Jack said. "If he'd held on for two more days."

Nobody responded. Nobody needed to. The arithmetic was simple—two days between Robert Morrow's frequency and the threshold. Forty-eight hours between a dead man and a completed shepherd. The margin between tragedy and transformation, measured in hertz.

Jack stood. The chair scraped against the floor—loud in the archive room's silence, sharp against the background hum of the Choir's construction and Brennan's prayers and the building's spiritual infrastructure.

"Detective—" Petrov began.

"Give me a minute."

He walked. The Night Library's corridors were familiar now—the routes mapped by weeks of pacing, the turns and stairs and dead ends that he navigated on autopilot while his mind processed what the registry page had told him. His feet took him to the roof. The same parapet where he'd sat with Marcus. The same view of the city—lights, buildings, the shimmer of the barrier painting the sky with invisible architecture.

His father had seen this. Not this exact view, not from this building, but the same shimmer. The same overlay of the dead on the living world. The same gradual intrusion of another frequency into the visual field. Robert Morrow—age thirty-one, married, father of a three-year-old, hearing voices that nobody else heard, seeing things that nobody else saw, feeling his body change in ways that his doctor called "stress" and his wife called "withdrawing" and his own mind called "madness."

Jack had been three when his father died. He didn't remember the man. He remembered the absence—the space in the house where a father should have been, the photographs his mother kept and then packed away, the questions he'd asked as a child that received answers calibrated for a boy too young to understand suicide. *Your father was sick, Jackie. He went to a place where he doesn't hurt anymore.*

Sick. The word his mother used. The framework she'd been given—a man with a mental illness who'd succumbed to it. A tragedy. A weakness. The story that Jack had grown up with, internalized, carried into adulthood as the foundational narrative of his family. His father was weak. His father couldn't handle it. His father chose to leave rather than fight.

Thirty-nine years of that story. Thirty-nine years of the anger—the cold, specific, ineradicable anger of a son toward a father who'd abandoned him. The anger that had shaped Jack's personality, his relationships, his career. The reason he became a cop—to be strong where his father was weak. The reason he never quit, never gave up, never stopped working even when the voices were loudest and the cases were darkest and the loneliness was a physical weight on his chest. Because quitting was what Robert Morrow did. Because giving up was genetic. Because somewhere in Jack's blood, his father's weakness waited, and the only defense was relentless, stubborn, grinding forward motion.

All of it wrong.

Robert Morrow wasn't weak. Robert Morrow was fighting the same war Jack was fighting—the same adaptation, the same transformation, the same slow becoming. But Robert Morrow fought it alone. Without Cross's mathematics. Without Tanaka's monitoring. Without Brennan's wards or the Choir's cage or Santos's operational planning. Without any of the infrastructure that Jack's team had built to support a process that, without support, destroyed every shepherd it touched.

His father hadn't given up. His father had been fighting for forty-seven days—the duration of his adaptation, documented in the Vigil's precise records—without understanding what he was fighting or why. Forty-seven days of voices getting louder, visions getting clearer, body getting stranger. Forty-seven days of a man who thought he was losing his mind doing the only thing he could think of to protect his family from what he believed he was becoming.

He killed himself because he loved them. Because a man who couldn't trust his own perceptions couldn't trust himself around his wife and his son. Because the voices might be telling him to do things—he didn't know they were just dead people talking, he thought they might be commands, orders, the hallucinations of a deteriorating brain. And a deteriorating brain near a three-year-old was a danger. And Robert Morrow, who didn't know he was a shepherd, who didn't know the voices were real, who didn't know his body was two days from completing a transformation that would have explained everything—Robert Morrow made the decision that a frightened, isolated, uninformed man makes when he believes he's becoming a monster.

He removed himself from the equation.

Jack gripped the parapet. The concrete rough under his palms. The city below him—the same city his father had lived in, worked in, heard the dead in. The same barrier his father had been adapting to. The same frequency, 7.83 hertz, that Robert Morrow had been 0.02 away from reaching when he decided that reaching it was the worst thing that could happen.

The shimmer was strong tonight. The dead moved through Jack's peripheral vision—spirits passing through the Night Library's airspace, drawn by the Choir's frequency, guided by Grace's shepherding. The same dead that Robert Morrow had seen. The same dead that had convinced Robert Morrow he was insane.

Jack's eyes burned. Not from the frost—the vitreous hemorrhage had almost completely resolved. Not from the shimmer—he'd learned to manage the double-vision. His eyes burned because he was crying. Standing on a rooftop in a haunted building, his cells vibrating at 7.59 hertz, five days from completing the transformation that killed his father, and crying for a man he'd been angry at for thirty-nine years.

The anger was still there. It didn't dissolve—anger that old doesn't dissolve, it transforms. The anger at his father for being weak became anger at the world for making his father fight alone. Anger at the Vigil for failing to reach him. Anger at whatever system, whatever cosmic architecture, whatever indifferent mechanism selected people for the adaptation and then provided no instruction manual. Anger that Robert Morrow—shepherd #39, frequency 7.81, outcome terminated—had been treated by the universe as disposable. A failed experiment. A broken tool.

The anger was cleaner now. Aimed at the right targets.

"Detective."

Voronova. On the roof. Her hitch-step gait bringing her to the parapet beside him. She didn't look at his face—the operative's courtesy, the trained awareness that a man who was crying didn't need someone cataloging his tears.

"I knew," she said. "When I read your file—before I came to the Night Library—I knew about your father. The Vigil's records are cross-referenced. Shepherd thirty-nine. Robert Morrow. Adaptation failure."

"You didn't tell me."

"No."

"Why?"

Voronova stood beside him. Her body swaying with the hitch-step rhythm, the dual-frequency tremor that never stopped. The barrier's resonance in her bones—the same resonance that was rewriting Jack's cells, the same resonance that had driven his father to suicide.

"Because I did not know how to say it. I am an operative. I deliver intelligence assessments and tactical evaluations. I do not—" She stopped. The hitch-step wavered. "I do not know how to tell a man that his father died of the same thing that is happening to him."

"Same thing. Different outcome."

"Yes. Different outcome. Because you have what he did not. Knowledge. Support. A team of people who understand what you are becoming and who have built the infrastructure to help you survive it." Voronova turned to him. The shimmering eyes—the dual-frequency gaze—meeting his. "Your father was brave, Detective. The Vigil's assessment uses clinical language—*terminated, self-inflicted*—but the watcher's personal notes, which are not in the official file, describe a man who fought his adaptation with extraordinary determination. Forty-seven days. Most unsupported shepherds break within twenty. Your father lasted forty-seven days on willpower alone."

Jack wiped his face. The detective's composure reassembling—not because the emotion was gone but because the emotion had delivered its message and the composure was needed for what came next.

"The watcher," Jack said. "The Vigil had a watcher assigned to my father."

"Yes. Protocol for identified shepherds."

"The watcher watched him die."

"The watcher documented his adaptation and attempted twice more to make contact. Your father refused. The Vigil's charter prohibits forced intervention with unwilling subjects. The watcher—" Voronova's voice tightened. A fracture in the operative's professional delivery. "The watcher reported that your father's final frequency reading, taken remotely the day before his death, was 7.81 hertz. The watcher noted in her personal log that she believed, based on the adaptation's trajectory, that your father would have completed the threshold within forty-eight hours."

"Her."

"Watcher Designation: North America 17. Dr. Elena Kowalski. She monitored your father from 1980 to 1982. She requested reassignment after his death. She transferred to the Siberian section. She died in 1994."

A woman Jack never met. A watcher who'd observed his father's destruction from the required distance—close enough to document, too far to help. A woman who'd spent two years watching a man disintegrate and who, bound by organizational protocol, had done nothing but take notes.

"The Vigil's charter," Jack said. "No forced intervention."

"No forced intervention. The charter was written in 1293, when the Vigil's founders believed that the shepherd's adaptation was a natural process that should not be disturbed. The charter reflects a seven-hundred-year-old philosophy of observation. Non-interference. The belief that the barrier manages itself and that human intervention risks more damage than it prevents."

"And now your organization is participating in a coordinated node disruption."

"Yes."

"Because Cross's math works."

"Because Cross's math works. And because the philosophy of non-interference has produced a barrier that is failing and forty-three shepherds of whom thirty-seven are dead." Voronova's hitch-step steadied. "The charter is wrong. It was wrong when your father died. It was wrong for every shepherd who died alone because the Vigil watched instead of helping. Director Petrov understands this. It is why he voted to participate."

Jack stood at the parapet. The city. The shimmer. The barrier that his father had almost become part of—the membrane that Robert Morrow's cells had been rewriting themselves to match, the frequency that his body had been approaching at 0.02 hertz per day for forty-seven days until the man behind the cells decided that the approach was the disease and the only cure was to stop the patient.

"I've been angry at him for thirty-nine years," Jack said. "For leaving. For being too weak to stay."

"He was not weak."

"No. He was fighting the same thing I'm fighting. With nothing. No team. No plan. No knowledge. Just a body that was changing and a mind that couldn't explain why."

"And he lasted forty-seven days."

"Forty-seven days." Jack's hands were on the parapet. His father's hands. The same hands—the same gift, the same cells, the same frequency-sensitive biology that had killed one Morrow and was transforming another. "I'm at day thirty-four. If I make it to forty-seven, I'll be past threshold."

"You will make it past forty-seven. You will make it past threshold. Because you are not alone."

Jack looked at Voronova. The operative. The watcher turned actor. The woman whose organization had let his father die and was now trying to help his father's son survive.

"Tell Petrov something for me," Jack said.

"What?"

"Tell him the Vigil's charter should have been changed thirty-nine years ago. And tell him that if we survive this—if the disruption works and the cage holds and the barrier stands—the charter gets rewritten. No more watching shepherds die. No more documentation-only protocols. The next shepherd who starts hearing voices gets a visit from someone who explains what's happening to them. Gets monitoring. Gets support. Gets everything my father should have had."

Voronova was quiet. The hitch-step continued—the body's ceaseless negotiation with two frequencies. But her eyes, the shimmering dual-frequency eyes, held something that Jack hadn't seen in the operative before. Something that looked like agreement. Or grief. Or the particular expression of a person who served an institution they loved and knew it had failed.

"I will tell him," she said.

---

Jack went back to the archive room at midnight.

Cross was still there. Still working. The Vigil's data spread across the table, being integrated into his standing wave model with the methodical intensity of a scholar who'd been given the primary sources he'd spent a lifetime needing.

Petrov's folders were open. Cross's annotations covered them—red ink on the Vigil's standardized pages, the antiquarian's precise handwriting layered over centuries of organizational record-keeping.

Jack sat across from him.

"You found my father's entry before you asked me his name," Jack said.

Cross set down his pen. The gesture deliberate—the scholar choosing to be fully present for a conversation that required more than divided attention.

"I recognized the pattern," Cross said. "New York metropolitan area. 1982. A shepherd whose adaptation overlapped with a barrier fluctuation event at Henderson Station—the same node where your adaptation accelerated. The hereditary gift transmission noted in the file. The son, born 1979, exhibiting auditory perception at age three." Cross met Jack's eyes. "I did not need your father's name to know whose file I was reading. I needed his name to confirm what the pattern had already told me."

"You knew I was a hereditary shepherd."

"I suspected from the first week. Your gift's early onset—age eight—is consistent with second-generation shepherd biology. First-generation shepherds typically develop perceptive capabilities in late adolescence or early adulthood. Second-generation shepherds inherit the cellular predisposition and manifest earlier. Your adaptation, when it began, progressed faster than the average documented case. This is also consistent with hereditary transmission—your cells were pre-adapted, carrying the frequency sensitivity from birth."

"My father didn't know any of this."

"Your father knew nothing. He was shepherd thirty-nine in a registry of forty-three, and he died believing he was mentally ill." Cross's voice carried no judgment—the antiquarian stating facts with the same neutral precision he applied to every other data point. But his eyes, red-rimmed and exhausted, held something that wasn't neutral at all. "The Threshold describes the shepherd's adaptation as 'the body's recognition of its purpose.' Your father's body recognized its purpose. His mind could not reconcile that recognition with any framework available to him. The dissonance between what his cells knew and what his mind believed killed him."

"He was two days away."

"Two days. 7.81 hertz. The threshold at 7.83. The gap: 0.02 hertz. At his documented rate of adaptation, he would have reached threshold on November 14, 1982. He died on November 12."

Numbers. The same kind of numbers Tanaka recorded in her chart every morning—Jack's frequency, the gap, the rate, the projected completion date. The data points of a metamorphosis. But these numbers belonged to a dead man. A man whose chart ended two entries before the final one.

"Cross."

"Yes."

"My father's frequency was 7.81. Mine is 7.59. In five days, I'll be where he was."

"Yes."

"And two days after that, I'll be where he never got to be."

"If the adaptation proceeds as projected. If the disruption operation does not accelerate the process. If—" Cross paused. The rare moment of the antiquarian censoring himself. Choosing which data to present and which to withhold. "Yes. In seven days, you will cross the threshold your father did not reach."

Jack looked at the registry page. Still open on the table. **Shepherd #39. Robert James Morrow.** His father reduced to a data point. A case study. A failure in the Vigil's institutional record—one more body in the 86 percent.

But also a man. A father. A person who'd heard the dead and fought the voices and loved his family and lost the war that his son was now fighting with better weapons and more allies and the specific, burning knowledge that losing was not an option.

"I used to think he gave up," Jack said. "I built my whole life on not being him. On being the guy who doesn't quit. Who stays. Who keeps working the case no matter how bad it gets." He touched the registry page. The paper rough under his fingertips. "He didn't give up. He fought for forty-seven days with no help and no understanding and no one to tell him that the thing killing him was actually trying to save the world."

"He was a brave man," Cross said.

"Yeah." Jack pulled his hand back from the page. "He was."

Cross returned to his work. The pen resumed its scratching—annotations on the Vigil's data, calculations refining the disruption sequence, the scholar's inexhaustible focus redirected from revelation back to mechanics. But he left the registry open. The page with Robert Morrow's entry visible on the table. A silent acknowledgment that the data point was more than data.

Jack sat in the archive room for another hour. Watching Cross work. Listening to the Choir build. Feeling his cells vibrate at 7.59 hertz—the frequency his father had reached and passed, the frequency that was carrying Jack toward the same threshold that had been, for Robert Morrow, the edge of the world.

In five days, he'd be at 7.81. His father's final number. The frequency of a man who couldn't see past the noise to the signal underneath.

In seven days, he'd be at 7.83. The number his father never reached. The frequency of a shepherd who'd made it through—not alone, not unsupported, not fighting a war he didn't understand, but surrounded by people who knew what was happening and had decided to face it with him.

Five days to his father's edge. Seven days to the other side.

Jack stood. Left the archive room. Walked the corridors of the Night Library, the dead drifting through his peripheral vision, the Choir singing their construction frequency, the building humming with the assembled infrastructure of survival—wards and prayers and mathematics and the stubborn, collective refusal of nine living people and seventeen dead ones to let the barrier fall.

His father's war. The same war. Different weapons. Different outcome.

He'd make sure of that.