Friday brings the kind of small mercy she’s stopped expecting: an actual answer, on Daniel’s appeal, delivered to her only because she happens to be copied on a distribution list she never asked to be part of.

Preliminary review upheld. Case referred to Secondary Determination. Estimated resolution: 30-45 days.

It isn’t a win. She knows enough now to know how far that phrase sits from a win. But it isn’t the fast, quiet no that most of these get either — the kind she used to close without a second look, back before she understood what a close like that actually cost the person on the other end of it. Someone reviewed the case seriously enough to escalate it rather than dispose of it. That is not nothing, in a system built to prefer disposal.

She goes to Sector 9 after work to tell Elias, and finds him already told — Daniel got the same notice an hour earlier and came straight to the garden with it, so that by the time she arrives the two of them are standing at the gate together, and there’s something in the sight of it, the two of them side by side over a piece of paper, that catches in her chest before she can name why.

“Secondary determination,” Daniel says, when she’s close enough. “Elias says that’s actually good.”

“It’s better than the alternative,” Elias says. “I won’t call it good until it’s actually resolved. But it’s the version of this process that gives you the best odds you’re likely to get.”

Daniel looks lighter than she’s seen him, the specific unclenching of a man who has been braced for a blow that didn’t land, at least not yet. He doesn’t stay long — Priya’s expecting him, there’s dinner, there’s a life continuing around all of this the way life insists on doing — and when he goes, it’s with a handshake for Elias that lasts a beat longer than handshakes usually do.

“You gave him that,” Mara says, once he’s gone.

“I gave him language. He did the rest.” Elias looks tired in a way she’s noticing more often now, a tiredness that doesn’t quite match the hour. “It’s a small thing. I’d like it to matter more than it probably will.”

“It matters,” she says. “Don’t do the thing where you talk yourself out of the good part.”

He almost smiles at that — almost, the corner of something real showing before he lets it settle back into its usual careful stillness.

“Noted,” he says, and for once, the word doesn’t sound like something out of a committee minute at all.