Sera was already there when he arrived.
She'd taken a table near the window - not the back corner where Seo had sat, not the middle where Lira had sat, but the window itself, which meant she wanted to see the street and be seen from it. Two coffees waiting. Hers was half-finished, which meant she'd been here long enough to settle in, which meant she'd been thinking aboutthis for longer than the meeting itself.
"You're two minutes early," he said.
"You're two minutes late." She pushed the cup toward him. "Sit."
He sat. She looked at him the way she'd been looking at him since they were sixteen - the specific assessment of someone who had decided early on that she was going to know what was actually happening with him whether he wanted her to or not, and had been succeeding at this for nine years with a consistency that he'd found annoying at first and then simply accepted as a condition of knowing her.
"You look terrible," she said.
"Thank you."
"How long since you slept properly?"
"Define properly."
"More than four hours consecutively." She watched his face. "Right. So. What's happening?"
He drank the coffee. It was better than the usual place - she'd picked somewhere different, which meant she'd been thinking about this meeting specifically, not just suggesting the nearest option.
"You said you had something about the pattern," he said.
"I do. But you go first." She leaned back. "Because whatever is happening with you is bigger than what I found, and I want context before I give you information."
He looked at her across the table and thought about how much to say. Sera had field brief access - standard for strike operations personnel, who reviewed clearance data before deployment. She read closure reports as part of pre-mission preparation. She was sharp enough to notice inconsistency and methodical enough to track it. The fact that she'd noticed the pattern wasn't surprising. The fact that she'd tracked it for three months without filing anything - that was Sera making a deliberate choice.
"The unauthorized closures," he said. "I've been tracking them."
"I know." She held his gaze. "I've seen your reports. 'Method unknown' appears nine times in fourteen months. You don't file method unknown, Kai. You always have a theory. Even a bad one. You always have something."
"This one is different."
"Or you have one and you're not putting it in."
He said nothing.
She unfolded a piece of paper and set it on the table between them.
"Gate 38," she said. "Class-B, District 12, six months ago. I was on the response team. We arrived at 3:04 AM and it was already closed. Standard anomalous closure - filed method unknown, same as the others." She tapped the paper. "But the boss-class entity inside had three wounds. Two fresh. One older - roughly forty minutes."
Kai looked at the paper. "Someone went in before the team."
"Before the alert," she said. "Gate 38 opened at 2:47 AM. Alert dispatched at 2:49. The older wound dates to approximately 2:24." She let that settle. "Twenty-three minutes before the Gate officially opened. Which means whoever did this didn't respond to the alert. They detected the Gate forming before our systems registered it."
The afternoon street outside the window continued - a tram, pedestrians, the ordinary Thursday movement of a city that had normalized dimensional rifts.
"Why didn't you file it?" Kai said.
"Because filing it without a target creates more problems than it solves." She was direct, no apology. "If I submit an anomalous report flagging pre-entry capabilities without identifying who I'm flagging, Internal Affairs opens a wide investigation. Everyone near Gate 38 gets pulled in. People who have nothing to do with this." She paused. "I needed to know who before I could say what. I've been trying to find that for three months. Two weeks ago I confirmed the wound pattern appears in four other closures - same age differential, same entry signature. Same person, every time."
"Why tell me?"
"Because you've been the closest to this pattern and you've been careful about how you've handled it. That's either because you don't know what you're looking at -" She held his gaze. "- or because you do and you're protecting something. I'm trusting it's the second one."
He looked at her.
Sera had a specific quality he'd noticed years ago and never found in anyone else - the ability to offer trust as a statement rather than a question, without requiring acknowledgment or reciprocation. She put it on the table the same way she'd put the paper on the table. Here. Take it if it's useful.
"I don't know yet who I'm looking at," he said. Which was true enough, in the right light.
She nodded once. The nod of someone accepting that.
"Then find out," she said. "And when you do -" She paused. "Don't decide alone what to do with it. I know how you work, Kai. You pick something up and you carry it until carrying it becomes the only thing you're doing. You lose track of everything else." She met his eyes. "I'm asking you not to do that this time. Not with this."
He looked at her and thought about a notebook full of the same sentence written over and over. About Lira watching alone for two years. About Ren on a wet street corner saying *the math doesn't work alone anymore.*
"I hear you," he said.
She seemed to decide that was enough.
For forty minutes after that they talked about other things. Her team's latest deployment in District 3 - a difficult Class-B with irregular spawn patterns that had pushed the team's positioning. His assessment backlog, the District 11 file that still wasn't adding up. The coffee, which was genuinely better here, which she seemed pleased about in the specific way she was pleased about small things she'd gotten right. The rain that had come through on Tuesday and whether it had been as bad on his side of the city.
Normal things. The kind that existed underneath everything else and kept the everything else from collapsing inward completely.
When he stood to leave she stayed seated, both hands around her cup.
"Whatever it is," she said, "don't carry it alone." A pause. "I mean it. You have this thing where you decide something is your responsibility and then you disappear into it. I've watched you do it since we were sixteen." She looked at him steadily. "You don't have to do that. Not always. Not with me."
He stood at the table in the Thursday afternoon light and thought about forty-seven Gates and one pattern breathing in the data and a man who was losing pieces of himself every time he paid what he owed.
"I know," he said.
He meant it.
He left.