You start on day ninety-eight.

Not the portal — you're not ready for the portal. The portal requires precision you don't have yet, energy you can't control yet, an interface with the Aether Core that your body hasn't learned yet. The portal is the destination. You need the road.

The road is resonance.

Your steno holds the theory: the Aether Core broadcasts a dimensional frequency. Your polymorph cells can match frequencies — they've done it before. The Wanderer fight in the metro (match its frequency, become its opposite). The electromagnetic camouflage on the intersection (match the city's frequency, become background noise). Your body reads a signal and produces a response. That's what it does. That's what you are.

If you can match the Aether Core's frequency — not interfere with it, not draw from it, just match it — you can build a resonance bridge. Two identical frequencies, locked in phase, creating a standing wave between your cells and the Core. That standing wave is the road. The portal opens where the road ends.

The theory is clean. The practice is the problem.

You can't match a frequency you can't measure. And you can't measure MC's Aether Core without getting close enough to her heart to scan it — which means explaining what you're doing, which means explaining why, which means telling her that her heart is the lock and you are the key and the act of turning it might break her.

So you don't tell her.

You build a passive scanner instead. A modification to the device you rebuilt from MC's stolen components — a secondary array, hidden in the casing, calibrated to the Aether Core's frequency range. It doesn't ping. It doesn't probe. It just listens. When MC is in the apartment, your scanner records her heartbeat — not the physical beat, the mechanical pump of blood through chambers. The other beat. The dimensional one. The frequency that her Aether Core broadcasts across the barrier between worlds, the signal that says this is a fixed point, this is real, this is here.

You record it while she sleeps. While she cooks. While she sits on the couch reading reports from the Association. You stand at the desk with your steno open and your pen moving and the scanner on your waistband quietly cataloguing the rhythm of her heart without her knowing.

It takes two weeks to build a complete frequency profile.

The data is beautiful. You hate that you think that — hate the part of your brain that looks at the waveform analysis and sees elegance instead of exploitation. But it is beautiful. The Aether Core's signature is unlike anything in your database — a fractal pattern, self-similar at every scale, repeating with minor variations that correspond to MC's emotional state. When she's calm, the pattern is tight, controlled, a precise wave with clean edges. When she laughs, it loosens — the peaks spread, the troughs deepen, the frequency gains harmonics that make it richer and more complex. When she's near you, the pattern changes again — stabilises, strengthens, as if the Core recognises the cells that fixed it and responds with something that looks, on a waveform chart, like gratitude.

You don't put that in the steno. You don't write her heart is grateful when I'm close. You write the numbers. You write the frequencies. You keep it clinical because clinical is the only way to do this without drowning in the knowledge that you're mapping a woman's heart to use it as a door.

---

Day one hundred and twelve. You begin the replication attempts.

Not in the apartment — you can't risk MC seeing this. You use the cold room at Kwon's shop, after hours, when the butcher has gone home and the building is empty and the only witnesses are hanging carcasses and the hum of industrial refrigeration.

The cold room is good for this. Isolated. Insulated. No surveillance. And the cold suppresses the worst of the nosebleeds.

You stand between sides of beef at eleven at night and you try to make your body sing the same note as MC's heart.

It doesn't work.

Not the first time. Not the tenth. Your polymorph cells read the frequency profile from your scanner and they try — you can feel them trying, the pulling sensation in your chest, the structural cold of a shift beginning. But the Aether Core's frequency isn't like a Wanderer's. It's not like the city's electromagnetic grid. It's not a pattern your cells can simply mirror. It's deeper. More fundamental. The dimensional frequency of a fixed point in reality, and your body — adaptable, flexible, capable of becoming almost anything — keeps sliding off it. Like trying to grip smoke. Like trying to hold a note that exists in a register your vocal cords can't reach.

Each attempt costs you. Not as much as a full shift — there's no structural rewriting, no vision change, no two-day recovery. But each attempt burns through energy you need, leaves you lightheaded and shaking and hungry in ways that Kwon's leftover cuts can't fully address.

You keep trying.

Attempt seventeen. Your cells get closer — you feel the resonance build, feel the standing wave trying to form, feel the bridge extending from your body toward a frequency that isn't there because MC is four kilometres away in her apartment and the signal you're matching is recorded, not live.

That's the problem. You can't build a resonance bridge to a recording. You need the live signal. You need to be near MC when you do this — close enough for your scanner to feed real-time data to your cells, close enough for the resonance to lock, close enough for the bridge to find its other end.

Close enough for whatever happens next to happen to her too.

---

Day one hundred and fifteen. You adjust the plan.

Not abandon it — adjust. The cold room experiments taught you the parameters: your cells can approach the Aether Core's frequency but can't lock without a live signal. You need proximity. You need MC.

But you don't need MC to know.

The apartment is small. When MC is on the couch and you're at the desk, the distance between you is six metres. Your scanner's passive array can capture a live signal at that range — clean, real-time, no degradation. If you work at the desk while MC reads on the couch, your cells can attempt resonance matching using the live feed. No visible shift. No structural cold. Just the quiet, internal work of cells learning a new frequency, calibrating themselves against the signal that broadcasts from the chest of a woman who trusts you enough to sit six metres away with her guard down.

You do this for eleven days.

MC doesn't notice. She sits on her couch. She reads her reports. She makes tea, cooks dinner, talks about her day at the Association. And while she does these things — while she lives her life in the particular rhythm of safety and warmth and the quiet domesticity of an apartment that she has opened to a woman she believes is her friend — your body is learning how to use her.

The word lands in your steno at two in the morning on day one hundred and twenty-six, after MC has gone to sleep and you're alone at the desk with the scanner data and the waveform charts and the resonance calculations that are now, unmistakably, converging:

Using.

You stare at the word. Your handwriting is steady. Your hands aren't shaking. The nosebleed hasn't started yet.

Using her. That's what this is. She opens her door and you map her heart. She makes you dinner and you calibrate against her frequency. She says your name and you measure the harmonic shift in her Aether Core when she's happy to see you.

She trusts you. You are using her trust as a signal amplifier.

You close the notebook. You press your palms against the cover. The composite material is cold under your fingers.

You could tell her. You could sit at the kitchen counter tomorrow morning and say: your heart can send me home, and the process might hurt you, and I've been mapping your Aether Core for weeks without your knowledge because I was afraid that if I told you, you'd say yes, and if you said yes I'd have to live with the fact that you consented to something I should never have asked for.

You could tell her.

You don't.

Because she would say yes. You know her well enough now — ninety-five days of shared silence and borrowed warmth and the particular intimacy of a woman who hangs her jacket with the insignia facing the wall so you don't flinch. She would say yes. She would say take what you need, go home, find your fiancé, I'll be fine. She would mean it. And the cost would be hers and the guilt would be yours and you would carry it across a dimensional barrier into a life that's supposed to be the thing you're fighting for.

The portal calculations are ninety-three percent complete.

Your boots are laced. Your pack is by the door. The closet door is open three inches.

Day one hundred and twenty-six.