Sorine wavered.
Not from doubt of purpose. The purpose was clear, had always been clear, had been documented through seventy-five chapters of preparation and five chapters of execution. She would end Vey. She would complete the cycle. She would transform the Kanjo from maintenance into severance.
She wavered from love's persistence. The body remembering what the mind had decided. The viscera reluctant to release the hollow it had shaped. The form resisting the void it had contained.
She touched Vey's dissolving form. Her hand passed through, or failed to pass through, or existed in the same space as their dissolution without clear relation to it. She spoke their name. The sound carried, or did not carry, or became part of the atmospheric resonance that was indistinguishable from Vey's substance.
She experienced, one final time, the Kanjo. The space between, which was not empty but full of everything they had not said, everything they had not resolved, everything they had chosen to maintain as distance. The hollow and the viscera, pressed together, maintaining form through mutual pressure. The love that existed only because it was not consumed, only because it was documented rather than experienced, only because it was maintained as threshold rather than crossed as boundary.
The hesitation lasted 3.7 seconds.
The duration was not chosen. It emerged from structure, from pattern, from the geological resonance of their shared history. 3.7 seconds: the length of Vey's blackout in Chapter 69, the moment of Ren's first activation of the Key, the calibration of their maximum touch in Chapter 35. Structure echoed. Pattern persisted.
But hesitation was not reversal. The 3.7 seconds ended. Sorine's purpose resumed. The ending proceeded.