She pinned the images to the council chamber wall and let them speak.
Two body diagrams. Same species. Different shapes. The DNA helix with its annotations that nobody in the room could fully read but everyone could understand well enough: the people at the other end of the signal had changed themselves. Deliberately. Over centuries.
The chamber was the largest enclosed space in Tidemouth — a Before hall with stone arches and narrow windows that let in slats of afternoon light. Forty people packed into seats designed for thirty. The scholarly council, the harbor council, the trade commission, Commandant Hara's defense advisory. Renna had called them all. Kael had wanted a smaller audience. Renna had overruled her. "You don't change the world in whispers, glass-eye. You change it in rooms full of people who will shout about it afterward."
Kael presented the evidence in the order she'd assembled it. The signal. The mathematics. The Lincos protocol. The physical measurements. The images. She spoke for thirty minutes with the controlled precision of a woman who ground lenses for a living and understood that clarity was not the same as simplicity. She showed them everything. She hid nothing.
When she finished, the room erupted.
Not the careful, sequential debate of a scholarly council. A storm. Everyone talking at once, hands waving, voices cracking. Sekani wept openly, his thin body shaking in his chair, his hands gripping the armrests as though the room were pitching like a deck at sea. Hara stood with her arms crossed, scanning the images with the particular intensity of a soldier assessing a threat she didn't know how to fight.
"This is a trick," said Councilor Bren, a harbor merchant whose primary qualification for governance was stubbornness. "A Before machine, cycling through old programs—"
"The responses are adaptive," Kael said. "They respond to what I send. They learn. They correct errors. This is not a recording."
"Then it's a trap. Something luring us—"
"Luring us to what? There's nothing south but ocean and death."
"Exactly. So why would anyone be there?"
"That," Kael said, "is the question I want answered."
Three proposals emerged from the chaos.
Olu's faction — the scholars — wanted more data. Continue the exchanges. Build the shared language further. Learn everything possible before making any physical commitment. "We have time," Olu argued. "The signal has been there for centuries. It isn't going anywhere."
Renna's faction — the traders and politicians — wanted to capitalize. Establish the city-state's primacy in this discovery. Send an expedition. Claim the contact. "Whoever reaches them first writes the terms," Renna said with the directness that made her invaluable and insufferable in equal measure.
Hara's faction — the soldiers and cautious — wanted to prepare for the worst. Strengthen defenses. Assume hostility until proven otherwise. "They changed their own biology," Hara said, jabbing a finger at the body diagram. "They turned themselves into something else. What does a species do when it's willing to rewrite its own genome? It does whatever it takes. We need to be ready for 'whatever it takes.'"
Kael stood in the center and tried not to lose her patience. They were having three conversations that needed to be one. She said: "I need to talk about the ocean."
The room went quiet. The ocean. The Crossing. The thing nobody wanted to discuss because discussing it meant confronting a reality that stories and superstition had covered over for generations.
"The signal comes from approximately fourteen thousand kilometers to the south. That means crossing open ocean — the Atlantic, the Crossing, whatever you want to call it. The water that kills ships, corrodes metal, and poisons anyone who breathes near its surface on the wrong day. The water that no one has crossed in five hundred years."
"Then we don't cross it," Bren said.
"Then we never know who they are. We exchange mathematics forever. We send pictures back and forth. And we never stand in the same room. Never touch. Never see each other's faces in anything but crude pixels." Kael paused. "I can tell you what they know. I can tell you what they look like. I cannot tell you who they are. For that, someone has to go."
The argument took three days. Three days of sessions that ran from dawn to dark, of factions forming and dissolving and reforming, of Renna working the margins and Hara demanding guarantees and Olu cautioning patience that nobody had. Kael spoke when she needed to and listened when she didn't, and at the end of three days the council voted.
The expedition was authorized. Twelve ships. Volunteers only. The city-state would fund the construction and provisioning. The scholarly council would select a signal specialist to maintain communication during the crossing. The soldiers would provide weapons and training for hostile contact.
Twelve ships because that was the number they could afford to build and provision in the time frame Kael's analysis suggested. Each ship would take a different route, spreading the risk across multiple corridors. The theory — such as it was — was that at least one route might be survivable if the weather cooperated and the H₂S belts shifted. The probability of any given ship surviving was low. The probability of at least one surviving, across twelve independent attempts, was... less low.
Renna called it "acceptable risk." Kael thought the phrase was obscene but didn't say so because the alternative — doing nothing — was worse.
"We need sailors," Kael said. "Real sailors. People who understand the ocean, who've worked the coastal routes, who know how to read weather without instruments and navigate by stars and current."
"We need scholars too," Olu said. "Someone who can communicate. Someone who can understand what they find."
"Send me," Sekani said from his corner, his voice clear and strong in a way that startled the room. "I've waited my whole life for this."
"You're eighty years old, Sekani."
"I'll die on the water or I'll die in my bed. One of those deaths has a story worth telling."
Kael looked at him — his milky eyes, his toothless smile, his absolute conviction — and loved him, and said no. "I need you here. You're the only one who can explain this to the people who aren't in this room. You're the only one they'll listen to."
The hardest conversation happened alone, in her workshop, in the dark.
Kael could not go.
She had known this before the vote. She had known it the way she knew a lens was flawed — in her body, in the sick certainty of her hands. She was the only person who fully understood the communication protocol. The shared language she'd built with the entity was in her head — not just the notation, which was on paper, but the logic, the rhythm, the instinct for what worked and what didn't. If she went and died in the crossing, the signal connection died with her. Olu could maintain the equipment, but Olu couldn't speak. Not the way she could. Not the way the entity expected.
If she stayed, the signal lived. If she went, the signal died. And without the signal, the crossing was truly blind — no navigation help, no coordination, no way to tell the entity they were coming.
She had discovered the signal. She had broken the silence. She had built the language. And she could not follow it.
She sat in the dark and let this truth settle into her bones. Outside, the harbor was quiet. Somewhere on the docks, Moss was probably working on some hull, doing what Moss did — physical labor with physical tools in a physical world. He didn't know yet about the expedition. He would know tomorrow, when the call for volunteers went up. He would read it and think whatever Moss thought, which Kael could never predict because Moss was the least predictable person she knew, and she would stand at the north gate and watch twelve ships sail south and be unable to follow.
She needed someone on those ships. Someone she trusted. Someone who could see clearly, adapt quickly, and survive on stubbornness and luck. Someone who had sailed south before and come back.
She didn't say his name out loud. She didn't need to. The workshop held the thought the way a lens holds light — focusing it, making it sharper, turning it into something that could burn.
Tomorrow she would find him on the dock. Tomorrow she would tell him about the signal, about the other humans, about the ocean and what waited on the other side. She would not ask him to go. She would tell him what was there, and she would trust him to make the choice that was his to make.
And if he chose to stay, she would find someone else. And if he chose to go, she would stand on the breakwater and watch him sail into the Crossing, and she would keep the signal alive until he reached the other side or until the ocean proved that some silences are final.