5 February 2029  ·  Retreat  ·  2:00 p.m.

The morning passes in the loose, unhurried rhythm of a group that has spent one night together and is now, incrementally and without ceremony, becoming slightly more itself. The common hall fire gets tended correctly this time — Varun again, without fuss, though Nikhil is watching carefully and taking notes with the focused application of someone who has decided that being outsmarted by a damper twice is once too many. The kahwa is replenished and the conversation moves in the particular way of a morning after a first night: people settle into corners and regroup and have the second conversations, the ones that begin to matter more than the first ones because the first ones have established enough ground for the second ones to go somewhere real.