Nobody volunteered. That was not how it happened.
What happened was this: Lira ran the models for two hours, quietly, without announcing what she was doing, and then she turned her screen around and showed them the geometry of the seventeen chambers and said — still quietly, still without announcement — that three of the chambers were oriented differently from the others. Not in their position within the pattern. In the direction of what they were doing.
Fourteen of the seventeen were waiting, in the way Kai had described: patient, deep, holding something inward. But three of them were not waiting.
Three of them were leaning.
"Toward what," Roan said.
Lira looked at the model. "Toward the surface. Toward — whatever is up here." She paused. "Toward the Field, I think. The resonance signatures match. They've been responding to it. Not to the sealed formation above them, not to the instruments. To the Field specifically."
Kai sat with that for a moment.
