It had been two weeks since the market morning when the shard’s resonance first brushed the air like a polite guest.

Now, the courtesy was fading.

The hum was never loud—just steady, an unseen thread woven through their days. It pressed softly at the edge of thought, humming beneath garden soil, lingering in the quiet before dawn. Neither Aria nor Virel spoke of it often. They didn’t need to.

That evening, the road home curved between wildflowers and the bones of old brick walls stitched together with ivy. The light was low and warm, the air rich with the scent of turned earth and distant rain.

“You feel it now?” Virel asked.

“More than yesterday,” Aria said. “It’s leaning toward us.”

He adjusted the strap of the co-op bag over his shoulder.

“Maybe we’ll let our little scout run a sweep later.”

“If you can get him to stop reorganizing your tools,” she said, smiling faintly.

They passed the vine-wrapped library, its doorway hung with circuit-board chimes that sang softly in the breeze. Ibrahim stood nearby, proud of a watch that finally kept time again—gears and circuitry meshed in quiet defiance. Aria admired it; it reminded her of her own hybrid timepiece, the one she’d reworked from her grandmother’s wind-up watch. Its steady tick had become more than rhythm. It was remembrance.

Farther along, Samantha pressed a loaf of warm bread into Aria’s hands with the unspoken kindness of someone who understood that bread was meant to be shared.

The world around them was small, ordinary, and alive: a child drawing constellations in chalk, a painted sign offering scrap for barter, the scent of mint drifting from Aria’s bag. Yet beneath it all, the hum persisted—calm, deliberate, listening.

At the top of the hill, Aria paused. The ridge was changing. The evening light traced new contours across its slopes, as though the land itself were stirring.

“It’s changing,” Virel murmured.

“Or we’re finally seeing it,” she answered.

Fireflies gathered as they reached the porch. Inside, the air was cool and fragrant with tomato blossoms. Aria set down the bread and brushed the flour from her palms, her gaze drifting back toward the ridge.

The shard waited beneath that rise—patient, aware, and now impossibly near. Its presence no longer sounded like silence.

It sounded like invitation.

And somewhere deep within her—quiet, certain, unafraid—Aria was already saying yes.