Jennifer arrived at Wilbur just after dawn, three days after her last visit. The drive from Palo Alto had become automatic—the route north, the turn toward the mountains, the dirt road winding through dry hills. David had been awake when she left, sitting in his office with the lights off, running session data he'd already analyzed a hundred times.
She found Starseed in the 109, floating motionless in the pre-dawn dark. His eyes were open but seeing nothing in this world. His breathing had slowed to something that barely qualified as breathing. The steam rose around him, obscuring and revealing his face in shifts, and for a moment she saw the doubling—the ordinary man and the passenger merged in silence.
She'd known he was here before she'd parked the car. Had felt the pressure building during the last mile of the drive, the certainty that he was going under. She'd walked straight to the flumes without stopping at her cabin.
"Come back," she said. Not loudly. Not with panic. She'd learned by now that panic made it worse, that her own fear transmitted through whatever connected them and pulled him deeper instead of back. She spoke the way you'd speak to someone standing at the edge of a cliff: calm, certain, present. "Feel my hand. Feel the water. Feel your breath."
His eyes focused. The doubling faded. And he looked at her with wonder, or gratitude, or the complicated thing between them that didn't have a name yet.
"You knew," he said. "How did you…
