ABOVE
Dresner was at the documentation table when Kai came back up.
She had spread the authority's codex across the full length of the table — not the summary volume, but the complete codex, the one that weighed four kilograms and carried the dry institutional scent of something unopened for years. Her second assessor, a quiet man named Tovak who had said perhaps eleven words since the team's arrival, was cross-referencing the custodianship protocol against something in the codex's third section with the focused economy of someone who had found a thread and intended to follow it to the end.
She looked up when Kai entered.
She looked at him the way she had looked at the gap-tracings. The particular grey-eyed quality of someone recalibrating.
"You're different," she said.
"The completion changes the carrier," Kai said. "Not structurally. The Null Field is the same instrument it was this morning. What it's holding is new."
"What is it holding?"
