The Church heard the signal too.
Not the way ordinary people heard it — not the unnamed weight suddenly named, not the moment of recognition that had woken two point four million people in the predawn dark and sent forty-seven cities reaching for whatever communication channel they could find.
The Church heard it the way institutions hear things that threaten them.
As data.
The monitoring network — what remained of it after Hael's team had spent three weeks dismantling the residential tier — still had its upper infrastructure intact. The senior level reporting channels. The city-to-city communication architecture that the Church had built over two hundred years to maintain institutional coherence across the kingdom's three hundred cities.
That infrastructure had felt the combined signal travel through the node network at midnight.
And had logged it.
