The first to arrive was Yusuf.
He didn't knock.
He wheeled in a rusted cart covered with tarp and smelling faintly of motor oil and mint.
He stood in the doorway of the bookstore, blinking against the morning sun.
— "You posted the question?" he asked.
Emir nodded.
Yusuf grinned.
— "Then I brought a response."
They sat on the floor in the back room while Ziya soldered in silence.
Yusuf unpacked a mess of parts: pressure plates, water regulators, a hand-cranked alternator welded from an old bike chain.
— "I built a thing that pulls moisture from dry air to irrigate a tomato field," he said, hands working while he talked.
— "It kinda works.But if your drawing means what I think it means…we can make it breathe."
Ziya glanced up.
— "You're a mechanic?"
— "I'm a farmer's son.And farmers don't fix.They adapt."
—
The next day brought Ece.
She arrived late, drenched from rain, and holding a sketchpad full of overlapping city grids and spirals drawn over building plans.
— "I'm here for the geometry," she said.
She pointed to the copper coils in Emir's original drawing.
— "That's not art.That's harmonic balance."
She dropped her bag and added:
— "And I want to live in a country where that matters."
—
Leyla came next.
Former military.Straight spine, tired eyes.
She carried nothing but a small toolkit and a document folder labeled:"REDACTED - UNSUITABLE FOR APPLICATION."
Inside: drone designs.Some shaped like wings.Others like leaves.
She nodded toward Emir's page of fragments on the wall.
— "I've seen parts of these before.Used wrong.I want to see what happens if we use them right."
Ziya offered tea.
She didn't take it.
But she stayed.
—
And finally: Mehmet.
He entered with a single line of poetry on his lips.
— "Resonance is memory echoing through time,until someone names it 'science.'"
He sat without invitation and unfolded a diagram of plant cell responses to audio frequencies.
— "I study how living things remember vibration," he said.
— "You might be building a machine.But I think you're waking one up."
—
That evening, all six of them sat in the bookstore's back room.
The coil from Emir's dream sat in the center—half-finished, faintly humming.
Outside, the street was quiet.
Inside, they spoke in fragments.
But something had begun.
Not a lab.
Not a rebellion.
A method.
Emir watched them.
Felt something shift in the air.
He didn't say much.
Just added a line to his notebook:
"They didn't arrive with answers.They arrived like missing pages.And now the book is writing itself."