The message arrived on the fourth morning after coming home.
Not through the System. Not through guild channels or Church correspondence or the oversight board's formal communication network. Through Calder — who found it slipped under the clinic's back door before dawn, written on paper that was not from anywhere Calder recognized, in a script that took him twenty minutes and two pre-System reference texts to identify.
He brought it to Kael at breakfast.
"Pre-System framework," Calder said. "The same base structure as the Traveler's broadcast. Modified. Adapted into something closer to language." He set the paper on the table. "Someone who can read the Traveler's transmission frequency and write in it."
Kael looked at the paper.
The script was geometric — the same notation system as the tunnel markings in Ironhaven, the ones Calder had been documenting for six weeks. Dense, precise, carrying the quality of a framework that had existed before the System had words for anything.
