Quorum

She didn't answer immediately. The question deserved the courtesy of real thought.

"I don't know," she said finally. "I don't know who decides."

"You could ask." He said it without pressure. A simple fact of available options.

"I could." She looked at the cord looped around her wrist. The red had deepened since morning — or perhaps the light in the café had shifted. "But I don't know how to get back to the room. I didn't have an address. I had a feeling."

"And the feeling is gone."

"The feeling is different now." She paused. "Like it was a frequency I was tuned to and now I'm — not off it, but adjusted. Receiving something else."

He nodded slowly. He was doing the thing she'd noticed when he walked in: processing with his whole body, not just his face. As though the question had weight and he was redistributing it.

"My brother's name is Ellis," he said. "He's three years younger. We used to speak in a shorthand that took years to build and I can feel it going. Like ice." He looked at her. "Not melting. Sublimating. Disappearing without the intermediate stage."

She knew this word from the woman in the grey coat. The untranslation. The gradual.

"I'm not going to pretend I can bring you there," she said. "I don't have that kind of authority over it."

"But you could go back."

"Maybe." She wasn't sure this was true. She wasn't sure it was false.

"If you did," he said carefully, "would you ask on my behalf? Not for me to be let in. I don't think that's how it works. But to understand — whether what's happening to me is intended. Whether Ellis is the cost, or whether Ellis is something I might still save."

She looked at him across the table.

She was being asked to go back into a room she'd left only once. To carry a question that wasn't hers. To speak for someone who hadn't been chosen, or hadn't been chosen yet — she didn't know which.