The window was two weeks.
It felt like two hours.
The difference between what you knew and what you lived was that living something always made it larger than the number you'd assigned to it. Three days felt like a month. The longest night felt like five… The sixty thousand seconds of a two‑week window stretched in the basement like a space that had stopped agreeing to be measured.
They spent the first week preparing the transmission sequence.
Tal on the routing, the node synchronization, the fail‑safe thresholds.
Kael on the current modulation, the precise control required to keep the signal stable across six veins without introducing detectable ripple.
Aiden on the resonance maintenance, the shimmer directed at the terminal in a narrow beam, gold and blue‑white together in the same space, the diagnostic running in the background showing *background noise, clean* over and over.
Mara on the contingency map.
She had redrawn it three times.
