RYKE POV
---
The week before the ceremony had a texture Ryke recognized from every significant threshold this compound had crossed and had, by now, learned to simply inhabit rather than manage — the specific suspended quality of a family building toward something enormous while still, somehow, making breakfast and running rotations and living the ordinary days that made the extraordinary one worth having.
His father found him in the training yard on a Tuesday, the specific deliberate approach Holt had developed over months of learning to ask rather than announce.
"I'd like to speak," Holt said. "At the ceremony. Publicly."
Ryke looked at him.
He thought about the three months of rebuilding — the corridor conversations, the kitchen at two in the morning, the handshake that had meant c
