Year 7. Sixth annual convergence crisis memorial.
The numbers didn't change—973,000 names on the walls in lower Manhattan, the same brass letters, the same black granite. What changed was the people who came and what they carried when they arrived.
Rama stood at the perimeter before the ceremony, reading names the way he had since Year 2. Not all of them—the practice was symbolic and he knew it, the gesture of attempting what couldn't be completed being the point rather than the completion. He read names until the reading became meditative rather than deliberate, until individual names gave way to the weight of the accumulation.
The sky was gray again. November had been gray for six consecutive years of this visit. He'd stopped noticing it as coincidence.
Maya Chen arrived with Emma and Sophie twenty minutes before the ceremony.
