The echo arrived before the sound.
It moved through the world as a pressure change, subtle enough to be dismissed by instruments but unmistakable to those who had learned to feel rather than measure. It wasn’t a repetition of the convergence or the threshold—it was what followed them, the way a decision continued to exist long after it had been made.
Ethan felt it in the pause between breaths.
The compass responded with a new behavior, one he hadn’t seen before. Instead of warming or cooling, it vibrated faintly, as if registering resonance rather than direction. It was no longer concerned with where things happened. It was listening for how often they happened—how many times the same choice repeated across different people, different places.
Patterns were hardening.
At school, argume
