Chapter 234 - 235| Twelve of Us

Priya’s team had the fragment isolated within the hour, working through the night with the same careful, patient urgency that had carried this investigation through every previous impossible obstacle, and Allen found himself, gathered once more with his family in the meeting room’s pale, early morning light, watching the message slowly resolve itself across the shared display.

Twelve of us. Three children. Please —

The message cut off there, the signal apparently lost again before whoever sent it could finish, and the room fell into a silence considerably heavier than the one that had greeted the first message.

Nobody spoke for a long moment. Allen felt the words settle into his chest like something physical, and glanced around at his family, watching the same weight land differently across each of them — Irene’s hands curling slowly into fists, Vivian going very still, Everlyn’s fingers pressed flat against the table as though bracing herself against it.

"Twelve," Irene said finally, her voice carrying a rawness Allen rarely heard from her. "Three of them children."

"We don’t know their ages precisely," Vivian said quietly, "but even the word itself tells us enough to understand exactly what we’re walking into."

Allen let the silence stretch a while longer before finally speaking, unwilling to rush past the weight of it simply to arrive at the next practical step. "I want us to sit with this for a minute," he said. "Not plan yet. Just sit with it."

Myria, who had already half-reached for her tablet, set it back down without comment, and the room settled into quiet, difficult stillness — five people, and Priya beside them, simply absorbing the shape of what twelve lives and three children actually meant, before anyone tried to turn it into a schedule.

It was Everlyn who finally broke the quiet, her notepad held up with hands that trembled slightly despite her steady handwriting. I keep thinking about the tunnel, she wrote. The one I couldn’t save everyone from, all those years ago. I know this is different. I know we have a chance this time that I didn’t have then. I just needed to say that out loud before we start planning again.

"Thank you for saying it," Allen said softly. "I don’t think any of us are thinking clearly enough yet to name what we’re actually afraid of. That helps."

William, seated quietly near the door, finally spoke, his own voice careful in a way that suggested he’d been turning something over for a while before finally deciding to share it. "I keep thinking about what it must be like," he said, "to have finally sent something, and to have no idea whether it worked. I don’t have anything useful to add to the planning. I just wanted to say that I understand, at least a little, what it feels like to wonder if your one shot at being heard actually landed anywhere."

Allen glanced at his brother, recognizing in the admission an echo of William’s own long, difficult year of trying to prove himself worth listening to. "It landed," he said. "We heard it. All of it."

William nodded, something quietly moved crossing his usually composed expression, and the room settled back into its earlier, difficult stillness a while longer before anyone spoke again.

---

They spent the rest of that morning in unhurried, deliberate conversation rather than immediate action — not because the urgency wasn’t real, but because Allen had learned, across every previous crisis this family had weathered together, that decisions made in the first raw hour of grief rarely held up as well as decisions given room to properly settle first.

"I don’t want to compress the timeline out of panic," Priya said eventually, once the household’s earlier shock had softened into something steadier. "I want to compress it because it’s genuinely the right call. Those are different reasons, even if they lead to the same number of days."

"How do we tell the difference?" Irene asked.

"By asking what we’d actually lose by taking one more day to be certain," Priya said. "If the answer is nothing meaningful, we take the day. If the answer is real risk to the people waiting for us, we don’t."

Myria turned the question over with her own careful, deliberate focus. "Given what we now know," she said, "I think every additional day carries real risk. Not because I’m afraid. Because twelve people just told us, at considerable cost to themselves, that they’re still waiting, and I don’t think we get to treat that patience as infinite."

Vivian added her own quiet agreement. "I keep thinking about the children specifically," she said. "Adults can sometimes endure waiting in ways that leave fewer lasting marks. I don’t know that the same is true for whoever those three actually are. I’d rather move a day too early than a day too late, if we genuinely have to choose."

Allen nodded slowly, feeling the household’s collective resolve settle into something clear-eyed rather than frantic. "Then we compress," he said. "But we do it the way Priya taught us. Deliberately. Not desperately."

"I can have a revised timeline by this evening," Priya said. "I’d estimate somewhere between five and seven days, depending on what final preparation actually requires."

"Then let’s find out exactly what it requires," Myria said, finally reaching for her tablet again, and the household settled into its own renewed, focused work — grief and urgency held together now, the same steady way Myria had taught Irene to hold them, neither one canceling the other, both of them, together, carrying this remarkable family one careful step closer to whatever the walled garden still had waiting.

Allen lingered by the window once the planning session finally wound down, watching the morning light spread fully over Hegeville’s familiar rooftops, and found himself repeating the same quiet promise he’d made in the small hours of the previous night.

’We heard you,’ he thought again. ’Twelve of you. Three children. We’re coming, and this time we’re not waiting for daylight to start moving.’

He stayed at the window a while longer, watching the town wake fully into an ordinary morning that carried, for at least twelve people somewhere across an ocean, considerably more meaning than any of Hegeville’s own unaware residents could have guessed. Whatever the next several days demanded, he intended to meet every hour of it with the same steady resolve his family had already shown this morning — grief given its due, urgency given its due, and neither one allowed to eclipse the other.

Behind him, Myria’s voice carried quietly across the room, already turning toward tomorrow. "Five to seven days," she said. "Let’s make sure every single one of them counts."