Chapter 107 | Dana Marsh

Chapter 107: Chapter 107 | Dana Marsh

Dana Marsh called Denko first.

Denko called Kai at eight on a Wednesday morning in the third week of November. Kai was at the table with a Calloway Foundation document that had arrived from Denko’s office the day before — twenty-three pages of dungeon assessment contracts going back fourteen years, the Foundation’s name on every one.

"Dana Marsh wants to come," Denko said. "She has something. She said Mira would know what it was."

Kai set the document down.

"When," he said.

"Today if possible. She said she’s been carrying it for three weeks and she’d like to stop carrying it."

He looked at the hallway.

Mira’s door closed. From behind it the RF-7 running — not the album, not the eight-forty hertz frequency. Something else. Lower. The particular sustained tone she ran when she was working on something she had not named yet.

"Noon," Kai said.

"I’ll tell her," Denko said.

===

He knocked on Mira’s door at eight-fifteen.

It opened.

She had the RF-7 at her ear and the board in her hand and the look of someone who had been in the middle of something when the knock came.

He said: "Dana Marsh. Noon."

She looked at him.

She looked at the board.

She wrote: What does she have.

"Denko didn’t say," he said. "He said you’d know."

She held the board.

She looked at the doorframe.

She wrote: The second recording.

He looked at her.

Joel made three recordings the week before the expedition, she wrote. We heard the first one when she came before. She said the second recording — he talks about what he thought might happen. What he’d prepared for.

He looked at the board.

"She’s been carrying it for three weeks," he said.

Since the verdict, Mira wrote. She’s been waiting until it was done before she brought the rest.

She looked at the doorframe.

She wrote: Tell her to come.

He went to the hallway.

He called Denko back.

=====

Shira came out of the second bedroom at nine-thirty.

She had been running the form since before Kai was up. He had felt it through the Nerve Sense — the signal building through the wall, twenty beats, twenty-two, twenty-four. She had held twenty-four four times in sequence this morning, which was new.

She looked at Kai.

"Dana Marsh," he said. "Noon."

Shira looked at the table.

"The second recording," she said.

"How did you know," he said.

She looked at the window.

"Because the first one told us what he knew," she said. "The second one tells us what he did with knowing it."

She went to the window.

She stood there and looked at the November street.

He looked at her.

He looked at the Foundation document on the table.

He picked up his pen.

===

Dana arrived at noon exactly.

Same dark coat as before. Same steady quality in how she moved — the support-class instructor’s posture, the kind that came from spending days demonstrating correct form to people who were learning it wrong.

She came in.

She looked at the apartment. She had been here before. But she looked at it differently this time — the way you look at a place when you know what you are about to leave in it.

She sat at the table.

She set her bag on the floor beside her chair.

She looked at Kai.

She looked at Shira at the window.

She looked at the hallway.

Mira came out at twelve-oh-three.

She had the RF-7 case. She had the board. She had the white cane and she moved through the apartment with the Sound Mapping running — Kai could tell because her head orientation was slightly different when it was on, tracking the room in frequencies rather than sight. She found her chair. She sat.

She looked at the wall near Dana’s shoulder.

Dana looked at her.

She said: "The second recording."

Mira held the board.

She wrote: Yes.

Dana reached into her bag.

The same audio recorder as before — small, personal, the kind heroes used for debrief logs. She set it on the table.

She looked at it.

She said: "The first recording — he talked about the node. What he knew, what he suspected, what he was trying to document." She looked at the recorder. "The second recording is different. He had done the expedition briefing by then. He had seen the classification documentation. He knew it was wrong."

Mira held the board.

She was looking at the recorder.

Dana said: "He made it the night before the expedition. He was talking through what he was going to do. How he was going to manage the frequency if they went deeper than the classification allowed." She paused. "He talks about you in it."

Mira looked at the recorder.

Dana said: "I need to ask you something before I play it."

Mira wrote: Ask.

"When you were in the canyon," Dana said. "Did you feel his frequency. Before it — before what happened."

Mira held the board.

She was very still.

She wrote slowly.

She held it up.

It said: Yes. For eleven minutes before the incident I felt his frequency alongside the node. He was running a stabilization pattern — using his Gift to hold the node’s resonance steady so I could complete the assessment. He didn’t tell me he was doing it. He just did it.

Dana looked at the board.

She looked at her hands.

"He knew the node would destabilize under direct assessment," she said. "He planned to hold it."

Yes, the board said.

"He didn’t tell you."

No.

"Because if you’d known you would have refused to let him take the load," Dana said.

Mira held the board.

She wrote: Yes.

Dana looked at the table.

She said: "He talks about that in the recording. That you would refuse. That you would take it yourself if you knew." She looked at the recorder. "He was planning to hold the node stabilization and not tell you."

I know, the board said.

Dana looked at the board.

"You knew," she said.

I worked it out afterward, Mira wrote. From the frequency pattern. It took me a year to understand what he had done.

Dana looked at the board.

She looked at the recorder.

She said: "Do you still want to hear it."

Mira looked at the recorder.

She reached up to the RF-7 at her ear. She adjusted the calibration — a small movement, precise, setting the unit to full receiving mode. She looked at the wall near Dana’s shoulder.

She said: "Yes."

Out loud. Clear. Exactly as she had said play it the first time Dana had been in this apartment.

Dana pressed play.

—

Joel Marsh’s voice.

The same frequency as before — support-class, built to carry. But different from the first recording. The first had been methodical, a gift assessment log. This one was quieter. He was talking the way people talk when they are alone and thinking out loud and have decided not to be careful about it.

The classification is wrong. I’ve confirmed it three different ways now and it keeps coming out the same. The node is second-generation and it is not stable. An S-rank team going into an SSS-rank dungeon with a live second-generation node — the casualties are going to be bad.

A pause.

The Elys girl is going in. Mira. I heard her frequency at the briefing and it’s — she’s calibrated for this. Her base resonance is within a standard deviation of the node’s primary frequency. Which means when the node destabilizes, and it will destabilize, she’s going to feel it at full amplitude before anyone else does.

Another pause. Longer.

She’s going to want to stabilize it herself. That’s what she’ll do — she’ll try to use her Gift to hold it so the rest of the team can get out. The problem is her Gift isn’t strong enough to hold a second-generation node alone. Not at that frequency. She’d burn out the receiving channel completely trying.

A shorter pause.

So I’m going to do it instead. She won’t know until I start. By the time she realizes what I’m running she won’t have time to argue about it.

His voice changed — lighter, the particular lightness of someone who has made a decision and is at peace with it.

She has a better voice than anyone I’ve heard at eight-forty hertz. When this is done she should record the album properly. Not just the assessment training version. The real one.

The recording ended.

====

The apartment was quiet.

Mira was sitting with the RF-7 running in full receive mode and her eyes on the wall near the window. She had not moved during the recording.

Shira was at the window, facing away. Her right hand on the armrest. Still.

Dana looked at the recorder.

She looked at the table.

Kai sat at the table and did not say anything because there was nothing to say that would fit in the space the recording had left.

After a while Mira picked up the marker.

She wrote.

She wrote for longer than she usually wrote — not one line, not two. A full paragraph on the board, small and careful, each word placed deliberately.

She held the board up.

She held it toward Dana.

Dana read it.

She read it twice.

She looked at Mira.

She looked at the board again.

She pressed her lips together for a moment.

She nodded once.

She picked up the recorder.

She put it in her bag.

She stood up.

She looked at Mira.

She said: "He would have liked hearing that."

Mira held the board in her lap.

She did not write anything.

Dana looked at Kai.

She said: "The third recording — I’ll send it when you’re ready. There’s no urgency." She put her bag over her shoulder. "The third one is about the expedition team. What he thought about each of them. It’s gentler than the second."

Kai stood.

He walked her to the door.

She stopped in the hallway.

She said, quietly so it would not carry into the apartment: "What she wrote. On the board."

He looked at her.

She looked at the door.

"It’s the right thing," she said. "What she decided."

He looked at her.

He did not ask what the board had said.

She left.

===

He closed the door.

He stood in the hallway.

He went back to the table.

Mira had the board face-down in her lap. She was looking at the wall near the window.

Shira was still at the window. She had not turned around.

The apartment had the quality it got after something had moved through it that could not be moved back.

Kai sat down.

He sat there.

After a while Shira said, to the window: "He planned it before the expedition."

"Yes," Kai said.

"He went in knowing what he was going to do."

"Yes."

She looked at the street below.

"The stabilization pattern," she said. "Eleven minutes. He held the node stable for eleven minutes while Mira completed the assessment."

"Yes," Kai said.

"And then the classification failure hit," she said. "And the node destabilized anyway. And everything after that was what it was."

Kai looked at the table.

"Yes," he said.

Shira looked at the street.

She said: "He was support-class."

"Yes."

"Support-class heroes go in because someone has to," she said. "Mira said that. The first time Dana came."

"Yes," he said.

"He chose his someone," Shira said.

The table was quiet.

Mira’s board appeared.

She did not hold it toward either of them. She set it flat on the table face-up so both of them could read it if they chose to.

It said: He said I should record the real album.

Kai looked at the board.

He looked at her.

She was looking at the wall near the window. The RF-7 at her ear. Her hands in her lap.

Shira turned from the window.

She looked at the board.

She looked at Mira.

Mira did not look at either of them.

Shira said: "Then record it."

Mira held the board.

She looked at the wall near the window.

She wrote: I know.

She set the board face-down on the table.

She picked up her cane.

She went to her room.

The door closed.

From inside — the RF-7. Not the album frequency. Not the eight-forty hertz. Something new. A range Kai had not heard her run before.

Wider. Deeper. The receiving channel and the vocal pathway running together at a frequency that moved through the apartment walls and did not stop at them.

He sat at the table.

He sat there for a long time.

Shira came to the table.

She sat across from him.

She set her hands flat on the surface.

She said: "What did the board say. What she wrote to Dana."

He looked at her.

"I don’t know," he said.

She looked at him.

"I didn’t ask," he said.

She looked at his face.

She looked at the hallway.

She looked at the table.

"Good," she said.

She sat there with him while resting her head on his shoulder.