Eight million.
The number arrived the way sunrise arrived: on schedule, at a speed determined by variables he had been measuring for eleven months, entering his awareness not as announcement but as confirmation. He'd watched the demographic curves converge through Coldgate. Watched the seven-day probability window narrow to four days, then to forty-eight hours, then to a specific morning in Ironrise when the birth-and-conversion ledger crossed the threshold between one number and the next and the system registered it without commentary.
Eight million, one thousand, two hundred and forty personal Ordinists.
