The five hundred meter test broke something open.
Not in a bad way.
In the way that things break open when the container was always too small for the contents and the contents finally find a container that fits.
Nara sat in the clearing behind the clinic at dawn. Same position as the evening before — cross-legged, the suppression-era stillness present in her posture even three days out of the cell. The Domain around her, the System architecture clean and honest and accessible in ways it had never been accessible through a suppression field.
Maren had spent the previous evening studying Calder's pre-System references for Framework Memory documentation — there were three references, all fragmentary, all describing the ability differently enough that Calder suspected they were describing different between-walkers' versions of the same fundamental capacity. He'd prepared a monitoring protocol. Sera had a documentation checklist.
Kael stood at the clearing's edge and watched.
