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Cassian frowns. "And?"

Nyra looks between us. "What if they're not categories?" She begins moving the pages. "What if they're stages?"

Silence. I look down. Environmental irregularities appear earliest. Leaves blanching without dying. Migration patterns shifting. Rivers becoming unnaturally still. Then magical irregularities. Manifestations behaving incorrectly. Memory disturbances. Temporary loss of abilities. Then ward reports. Flickering. Hesitation. Pressure changes. Then disappearances.

My stomach tightens. "No."

Nyra's eyes meet mine. "I know." She says quietly.

"No, that's too neat."

"Maybe." She shrugs.

"History isn't that neat."

"Exactly."

Cassian leans forward. "So it only looks neat now because we're rearranging records written by people who didn't know they were connected."

Nyra nods. "That's my concern."

Concern. That's one word for it. She organizes the pages into rough columns. Environmental disturbance. Magical instability. Ward irregularity. Disappearances. I stare at the final column. Jonas. Elara. Stage four. Then my eyes move toward the records Nyra hasn't touched. Military deployments. Emergency notices. Border violence. The beginning of events history eventually decided to call war.

Cassian sees them too. His expression changes. "What comes after disappearances?"

Nyra doesn't answer immediately. She doesn't need to. I already know. "Attacks."

The word feels too loud despite being whispered. Nyra finally moves the last stack. Organized violence. No one speaks. Around us, the library continues. Pages turn. Someone coughs. A chair scrapes against stone. A librarian whispers at two students for talking too loudly. The ordinary sounds make the papers in front of us feel impossible.

"So this isn't the worst part." Cassian says.

"No." Nyra answers. "Not historically."

I stare at the dates. "How long?" She looks at me. "Between the first disappearance and the first attack."

Nyra reaches for another sheet. "I checked." Of course she did. She places three records in front of us. The first confirmed disappearance. Then another. Then the first event historians later classified as coordinated violence. I count. Again. "Forty-three days."

Cassian sits back. "Forty-three." Nyra nods. For the first time all morning, something almost resembling relief crosses his face. "So we have forty-three days." He says.

"No." Nyra's answer comes so quickly that the relief disappears. She points at the records. "They had forty-three days." Silence. Cassian looks down again. Nyra continues. "This is one historical sequence reconstructed from incomplete records." She precises.

"Meaning?" I ask.

"Meaning the first disappearance might not actually be the first disappearance." Fair. "The first attack might not actually be the first attack." Less fair. "And even if every date is correct, we have absolutely no evidence whatever is happening now will follow the same timeline."

"So forty-three means nothing." Cassian says.

"No." Nyra shakes her head. "It means something." She looks toward the timeline. "It means last time, there was a period between disappearance and open violence." A pause. "People were living through the beginning without realizing they were already inside it."

That chills me more than eleven days ever could. "How many disappeared during those forty-three days?" I ask.

Nyra looks down. "That's what I don't know."

"None recorded?"

"Some."

"How many?" Cassian asks.