He had told the others this. The tall man knew. The woman knew. That was part of what the argument had been about, underneath the projections and the risk assessments, the part neither of them had been willing to say directly.
'I know what I'm giving up,' the first Hollow thought, and Cael felt the thought as his own, layered over his own consciousness the way the fractured memory from the citadel had layered but complete this time, nothing missing. 'I know what this means for me. That's not the part that matters.'
He activated the device.
The conduit opened.
Not the way Fractures opened in the managed system Cael had grown up with, not the controlled dimensional seam with its iridescent edges and its slow breathing pressure. The conduit opened the way things opened when the force behi
