Four days after the tenth day, Shen Bao sent a single-character message through the drop point.
The character was the word for morning.
This was the code we had agreed on for: the audience has been granted.
I was in the east garden when the message arrived, watching the gardener put in the chrysanthemum beds I had requested. The morning was dry and cold but with the specific quality of late winter cold that contains within it the memory of what it will become — the sense that the change is not far. The gardener worked with the unhurried competence of someone who understood that plants operated on their own schedule and that haste produced nothing.
I held the message for a long time.
The audience had been granted.
