Morning arrived, and the wooden sphere and Sarya's folded page remained exactly where they had drifted the night before, suspended midway between the two unfinished ends of the Second Road, turning slowly around each other in a patient orbit that showed no sign of resolving.
Nothing else had changed.
And yet everyone at the Balance Branch, gathering again at the Road's edge with the particular bleariness of people who had barely slept, felt that something had shifted overnight in ways that resisted easy description. The researchers who had stayed through the night to monitor readings had expected, if anything at all, some dramatic overnight development — a breakthrough, a message, some clear escalation of contact.
Instead, they were greeted only by stillness.
"The deepest conversations usually look like silence from far away," the gardener said, watching the two objects turn slowly around each other in the pale morning light.
