Fourteen thousand, two hundred and seventeen simulations, and the answer hadn't changed.
Lily sat cross-legged on the floor of the Holy Redeemer basement, her back against the wall where Marcus had hung a corkboard that now held seven months of Commission correspondence, her tablet balanced on the shelf her belly had become. The baby shifted — a slow roll, hip to ribs, the particular movement that Hope performed every evening around seven o'clock with the punctuality of a being who already understood schedules. Lily breathed through the pressure. Her diaphragm had surrendered its full range of motion weeks ago, traded to the small person occupying the space where her lungs used to expand, and breathing had become a negotiation rather than an autonomic function.
The simulation matrix filled the tablet's screen. Each thread represented a probability line — a future, a potential, a way the world might go. Standard pregnancies produced signatures like bundled fiber optic cable: coherent, directional, converging toward a narrow range of outcomes that differed in detail but agreed on structure. One child. One timeline. One set of possibilities narrowing toward a single birth, a single life, a single trajectory through the sequential experience of being alive.
Hope's signature looked like the inside of a star.
The probability threads didn't converge. They coexisted — hundreds of futures occupying the same temporal space, overlapping without canceling, interfering without destructing. Each thread was a complete life, a full timeline, a version of Hope that existed simultaneously with every other version, and Lily could see every one of them. Some were beautiful. In thirty-seven percent of the threads, Hope grew up quiet and watchful, a girl who understood dimensions the way other children understood gravity — instinctively, without effort, as a basic property of the world she inhabited. In twenty-two percent, she was fierce, a presence that bent reality around her the way massive objects bent spacetime, not through force but through the simple fact of existing with enough density to warp the surrounding structure. In eight percent, she never learned to speak. In those timelines, she didn't need to. Language was sequential, and Hope's consciousness was simultaneous.
In four percent, she died before her first birthday.
Lily closed the four percent. She'd reviewed those threads six hundred times. She'd mapped the causal chains, identified the failure points, calculated the intervention windows. The four percent was managed. Contained. She could prevent it — she was already preventing it, her probability calculations informing every decision Marcus made about security, faction access, birthing conditions. The four percent wouldn't happen because Lily had seen it and Lily didn't allow preventable outcomes to materialize when the people she cared about were inside the probability envelope.
The problem was the eighty-seven point three percent.
She expanded the macro-analysis. The threads that didn't include Hope — the counterfactual runs, the simulations that modeled what happened if the pregnancy had never occurred, if the dimensional resonance from the Undoing had produced energy without direction, potential without expression. In those threads, the probability landscape was catastrophic. The dimensional architecture that the Undoing had restructured — two paths, expanded categories, the new theological framework that had allowed the Commission to operate and the factions to cooperate — destabilized without an anchor. The paths diverged further. The thin places thinned. The hellmouths widened. The boundary between existence and whatever lay beyond it eroded with the steady patience of water against limestone, and within three years the erosion reached critical failure and the dimensions collapsed into each other like a building whose load-bearing walls had been removed by an architect who didn't understand which walls were decorative and which were structural.
Eighty-seven point three percent. In eighty-seven point three percent of timelines where Hope didn't exist, reality itself failed within three years.
Hope wasn't a child. Hope was a structural necessity.
Lily had processed this information three days after discovering it, six months ago, sitting in the same position against the same wall while the simulation completed its first full counterfactual run. She'd stared at the number — 87.3 — and her analytical framework had provided its assessment with the dispassionate clarity that made her valuable to the Commission and sometimes unbearable to the people who loved her. The assessment was: Hope's existence was load-bearing. The pregnancy wasn't a biological event with cosmic implications. It was a cosmic event with biological expression. The dimensional resonance hadn't merely caused conception. It had generated the specific being required to anchor the dimensional architecture that the Undoing had created.
The universe had produced a solution to its own structural problem, and the solution was growing inside her, pressing against her ribs, performing its seven o'clock roll with the reliability of a mechanism that had been designed to work.
Hope shifted again. Lily placed her hand on the spot where the movement originated — the left side, below the ribs, the location that Hope favored during her evening acrobatics. The contact was warm. Through the skin and the muscle and the uterine wall, Lily's psychometric ability registered the faint dimensional static of a being whose existence spanned more frequencies than her biological interface could resolve. Touching Hope was like touching a radio tuned to every station simultaneously — the signal was there, complex and rich and layered, but the receiver could only capture fragments.
The fragments were enough. They showed Lily what Hope would be. Not a weapon. Not a tool. Not a containment system or a dimensional anchor in the mechanical sense that the factions would prefer. Hope would be a person who happened to exist across timelines the way other people happened to have brown eyes or perfect pitch — a characteristic, not a purpose. The anchoring was a consequence of her nature, not the reason for her existence.
Lily was certain of this because she'd run the simulations and because she was Hope's mother and because the two forms of knowledge — the analytical and the intuitive — agreed with each other in this instance with a concordance that approached unity.
She was also certain that every faction at the upcoming Assembly would see Hope as a resource to be managed.
***
Her manifestation ability flickered. The probability matrix stuttered — a gap in the data stream, a missed frame in the continuous calculation that her Nephilim neurology had maintained without interruption since she was fourteen years old. The gap lasted 0.3 seconds. She timed it because she timed everything, and because the gaps were getting longer.
Hope was drawing energy. The baby's multi-timeline existence required dimensional processing power that came from somewhere, and that somewhere was Lily's Nephilim biology — the same neural architecture that powered her psychometry and her probability calculations being redirected to sustain a being whose existence demanded more computational resources than any single consciousness could provide. Six months ago, the gaps had been imperceptible. Now they happened four or five times a day, brief interruptions in her awareness that felt like the cognitive equivalent of a power brownout — the lights dimming, the systems stuttering, the infrastructure straining under a load it hadn't been designed to carry.
She could still run the simulations. She could still see the futures. But the resolution was degrading, the threads growing slightly fuzzy at their edges, the probability calculations losing the decimal precision that distinguished her analysis from educated guessing. She was operating at perhaps eighty percent capacity. By the time Hope arrived, she'd be at sixty. Maybe less.
After the birth, when Hope's dimensional existence was no longer being sustained through biological intermediary, the drain would stop. Lily's abilities would return. Probably. The probability of full recovery was seventy-eight percent. She didn't think about the other twenty-two percent.
Marcus was upstairs, on the phone. She could hear his voice through the basement ceiling — the particular cadence he adopted for institutional communication, the measured professionalism that replaced his natural terseness when he was performing the role of Bridge rather than inhabiting it. He was talking to someone about logistics. Seating arrangements, probably. Security protocols. The particular infrastructure of cosmic diplomacy that required physical space for beings that didn't fully exist in physical dimensions.
He didn't know about the eighty-seven point three percent.
Lily had made the decision to withhold the number with the same analytical rigor she applied to every decision — weighing outcomes, calculating consequences, modeling the branching futures that each possible action generated. Telling Marcus would produce a specific set of responses: protective escalation, security tightening, faction communication adjusted to emphasize Hope's structural importance. The factions would learn, through Marcus's changed behavior if not through explicit disclosure, that Hope was essential rather than merely significant. And factions that understood something was essential behaved differently than factions that believed something was significant. Essential things were controlled. Monitored. Contained. Claimed.
Hope would not be claimed.
The probability models were clear. In timelines where the factions understood Hope's anchoring function before her birth, the outcomes skewed toward institutional possession — Heaven's jurisdiction, Hell's contracts, the Church's protective custody. Each faction would argue, with genuine sincerity, that their custody served Hope's best interest and the world's structural stability. Each faction would be wrong. Hope's anchoring function operated precisely because she existed between categories, untethered to any single faction's framework. Claiming her would compromise the mechanism. Like a bridge whose strength depended on connecting both banks — anchor it to one side and it became a pier. Functional, perhaps. But no longer a bridge.
So Lily carried the number alone. The way Marcus carried his bourbon and his rosary and his institutional burdens — privately, with the stoic endurance of a person who had decided that protecting others from the weight of knowledge was a form of care rather than a form of control.
She recognized the pattern. She'd analyzed it in Marcus and found it simultaneously admirable and infuriating — the particular arrogance of someone who believed their shoulders were broader than everyone else's, who absorbed weight not because they were stronger but because they couldn't tolerate watching others struggle. She'd argued with him about it. Pointed out the mathematics of distributed load-bearing: weight shared across multiple supports produced greater structural integrity than weight concentrated on a single point, regardless of that point's individual capacity.
He'd listened. Nodded. Poured bourbon. Changed nothing.
And now she was doing the same thing, carrying the 87.3 percent like a stone in her chest, protecting Marcus from the knowledge that his unborn niece's daughter wasn't optional — that Hope was the load-bearing wall in a dimensional architecture that would collapse without her, and that every faction in the cosmic framework had an institutional incentive to control the thing that kept their reality from unraveling.
The hypocrisy was precise. Lily appreciated precision, even when it revealed her own contradictions.
***
The tablet chimed. Simulation 14,218 had completed — the latest in the daily batch she ran during the evening hours when her probability processing was sharpest. The result populated the matrix, another thread added to the interference pattern that represented Hope's future: a life lived in a mid-sized city, away from Chicago, the dimensional anchoring functioning at distance because Hope's connection to the timeline structure was topological rather than spatial. In that thread, Hope was happy. She had friends who didn't know what she was. She ate cereal for breakfast and struggled with algebra because the sequential logic of mathematics felt backwards to a mind that processed everything simultaneously. She was ordinary in the ways that mattered and extraordinary in the ways that didn't, and the dimensional architecture held because she existed, just existed, a girl breathing and eating and complaining about homework while the fabric of reality stabilized around her the way water stabilized around a stone — naturally, without effort, as a consequence of presence rather than intention.
Lily tagged the thread. Favorable outcome. High probability of realization if intervention parameters were maintained. She added it to the cluster of futures she was cultivating — the carefully tended garden of possibilities that she watered with every calculation, every security recommendation, every piece of information she chose to share or withhold. She was engineering Hope's future the way she engineered everything: with data, with precision, with the fierce determination of a woman whose love expressed itself through optimization.
Hope kicked. A sharp one — the percussive protest of a baby who had run out of room and was registering her objection with the physical directness of someone who would, in every timeline, possess strong opinions about comfort.
"I know," Lily murmured. She adjusted her position, shifting the tablet, giving Hope another centimeter of space that wouldn't be enough but was all she could offer. "Soon. Three weeks. Maybe less."
The probability of early delivery was sixty-one percent. Hope's dimensional resonance was accelerating — the multi-timeline existence generating a kind of temporal pressure that pushed toward earlier manifestation. Lily had briefed Marcus on the medical aspects, the practical timeline, the logistics of delivery in a basement that sat on a hellmouth. She'd been thorough. Clinical. She'd provided the information that was useful and withheld the information that was dangerous, and the boundary between those categories was one she'd drawn herself with the authority of a woman who trusted her own judgment more than she trusted any institution's framework.
Downstairs — below the basement, in the space where the hellmouth whispered its dimensional static — Lily registered a fluctuation. Minor. A ripple in the probability field, the kind of disturbance that Hope's presence generated constantly as her multi-timeline existence interfered with the local dimensional architecture. The ripples were growing stronger as the pregnancy progressed. Three months ago, they'd been barely detectable. Now they rattled the filing cabinets if Hope moved suddenly, the physical world responding to the dimensional displacement the way water responded to a stone dropped from increasing height.
The ripples would get worse. After Hope was born, the interference would amplify as her presence became uncontained — no longer buffered by Lily's body, no longer filtered through biological intermediary. The factions would detect it. The thin places would respond. The dimensional architecture would shudder and resettle around the new anchor point, and the process would be visible to anyone with the instruments or the sensitivity to perceive it.
Lily had modeled this too. The transition period — birth through stabilization — was the window of maximum vulnerability. Every faction would feel Hope arrive. Every faction would want to respond. The Assembly that Marcus was organizing wasn't optional. It was the only framework that could prevent the response from becoming a competition and the competition from becoming a war.
She closed the tablet. The simulations would continue running in her head — they always did, the probability matrices a permanent layer of her consciousness, the background process that never fully shut down because her Nephilim neurology wasn't designed for the luxury of not-knowing. She would carry the 87.3 percent through the evening and the night and the three weeks that remained, and she would manage the information with the same precision she managed everything else, and she would tell Marcus when the time was right, which meant after Hope was born, after the Assembly had established its framework, after the factions had committed to cooperation rather than competition.
After. Always after. The particular temporal strategy of a woman who controlled what she could and endured what she couldn't and refused to pretend the two categories were the same.
Hope settled. The seven o'clock acrobatics concluded, the evening's performance complete, the baby subsiding into the stillness that preceded sleep. Lily placed both hands on her belly. The dimensional static hummed against her palms — the frequency of a being who existed everywhere at once, resting in the one place that was, for now, hers alone.
"I've got you," Lily whispered. The words weren't analytical. Weren't probabilistic. Weren't the product of fourteen thousand simulations or eighty-seven point three percent certainty or any of the mathematical frameworks that constituted her primary language. They were the words of a mother. Simple. Fierce. Absolute in the way that only things beyond calculation could be.
Three weeks. Maybe less.
The probability storm continued in silence, its architect holding its subject in the dark of a church basement, protecting the future the only way she knew how — by seeing all of it and choosing, with the deliberate precision of love, which parts to carry alone.
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