A quiet, stubborn resolve threaded through the fear. This was not salvage work alone; it was architecture. There would be nights of calculation and long sessions of negotiation, of votes and of small acts of mercy.
There would be betrayals and errors and, inevitably, grief.
But there would also be emergences—newness that did not feel like theft, but like transmutation. I wanted them to discover themselves without fear that their discovery would be spelled out in my footnotes. I wanted to be required to answer when a version of me had once been content to shrug and call it research.
I breathed in, slow. Names still mattered. They always had. But perhaps what mattered more now was not the name itself but the covenant that followed its utterance.
