The report came before dawn.

Not one report — four, arriving within two hours from four separate stations. The northern coastal network, the expanded version, the one Hector had built after the first eighty boats: designed specifically to distinguish between isolated sightings and connected movement.

Four stations reporting simultaneously meant connected.

Fylon was at the supply office door before the second hour. He had the quality he had on the worst nights — not urgency exactly, the specific containment of a man who had assessed something and decided that the person who needed to know needed to know now.

He said: "Four stations. Northern coast. And — there are two more."

"Two more what."

"Two more reports. Not from our network. From Lycia and Caria. They arrived through the harbor channel twenty minutes ago. Both sent yesterday."

Lysander looked at him.

’All three,’ he thought. ’At the same time.’

’Of course at the same time.’

’The tide does not arrive in sections. It arrives.’

"Wake Hector," he said. "Tell him I am already on the way to the northern gate."

________________________________________

He dressed in the dark and walked fast.

The city at the second hour — quiet in the way cities were quiet when they had not yet understood that something was happening at their edges. The harbor sounds, the distant watch calls, the specific silence of streets that would be full in three hours and were empty now. He walked through it thinking about four stations and two foreign reports and what it meant that all of them had sent within the same window.

Hector was at the northern gate when he arrived.

Miros was already there too — the floating role, the man who appeared at formations before he was called. He was looking north with the expression he used for situations that required assessment rather than action.

The gate watch captain gave the report: boats visible on the horizon, moving south. Not the count yet — the light was not enough. What they could see was the spread. The movement was not coming from one point. It was coming from a line.

’A line,’ Lysander thought. ’Not a cluster. A line means many origins moving simultaneously. Not one community displaced — a region.’

"How wide," Hector said to the watch captain.

"As far as we can see in both directions, sir."

Hector looked at Lysander.

He said nothing.

He did not need to.

________________________________________

They rode north at first light.

The patrol formation — the coastal interdiction unit, the one built for rapid movement. Twenty-four men. Lysander on the left flank, Miros at the front, Hector at the center. The horses moved fast on the familiar track, the same track they had ridden before.

What they found was not what they had found before.

The first time, there had been thirty-one boats on one section of beach. Families. Empty hands. The specific exhaustion of people who had been moving for a long time and had reached somewhere and were not sure if it was the right somewhere.

This time, the first section of beach had more than a hundred boats.

And the movement was still coming.

Hector stopped the formation on the ridge above the beach.

He looked.

The horizon was not empty. The horizon had shapes on it — small, dark, moving steadily south. The shapes were not stopping.

’This is not a wave,’ Lysander thought. ’This is what Cassandra described. The weight behind the foam. We have been looking at foam for months and calling it a wave and the actual wave is arriving right now and it is much larger than the foam suggested.’

’I want to be wrong about this.’

’I am not wrong about this.’

Hector said, quietly: "Numbers."

Miros had already been counting. He said: "The beach in front of us — between one hundred and thirty and one hundred and fifty boats. The horizon — I cannot count. The movement is continuous."

"Continuous."

"It has not stopped since the watch first reported at the second hour. Four hours. It has not stopped."

________________________________________

They came down from the ridge.

Hector deployed the formation as a presence, not an attack — the perimeter configuration, the same one they had used the first time, the one that said boundary rather than aggression. Miros moved the men into position with the quiet efficiency of someone who had drilled this until it was memory rather than thought.

Lysander walked forward.

He found the elder who came to meet them — there was always someone who came to meet them, the specific person in a displaced community who had taken on the role of interface because someone had to and they were the one who could.

This elder was a woman. Perhaps sixty. She walked with the deliberate pace of someone managing a body that had been moving for a long time and was conserving what was left.

She spoke.

He translated for Hector as she spoke — imperfectly, the coastal dialect familiar but not complete in his lexicon, gaps filled by context and the specific vocabulary of displacement that he had been building for months from Fylon’s sources.

She said: they had come from three different origin communities, all within two days’ sail of each other along the eastern coast. All three communities had emptied in the same week. Not attacked — the pressure had simply become unsurvivable. The food. The water. The disappearance of the smaller communities around them that had always provided the margin.

She said: there were more behind them. She did not know how many. She had spoken to people on the water who had come from further east. They described communities still moving. The movement was not finished.

’The movement is not finished,’ Lysander thought. ’The foam we have been managing for months is not the wave. The wave is arriving now. And the wave is not finished.’

He translated this for Hector.

Hector was quiet.

He said: "Tell her we see them. Tell her no one will be harmed here."

Lysander translated.

The elder looked at Hector for a long moment. Then she said something.

He translated: "She says — her community has been moving for six weeks. This is the first place where someone came down from the ridge to speak rather than to turn them back."

Hector said nothing.

He turned and walked back to the formation.

’He does not say anything because there is nothing useful to say to that,’ Lysander thought. ’And because saying something would make it smaller than it is.’

________________________________________

They held the perimeter all day.

It was the longest day Lysander had spent since the first wave — the management of the continuous, the problem that did not end but changed shape every hour as more boats arrived and the organization of the settlement on the beach shifted and the edge cases appeared. A child separated from her family in the crowd. A dispute between two groups over section of beach. A man who had been on the water too long and needed Antiphus.

Antiphus arrived at midday — he had heard from the palace network and had come without being summoned, with Reos and Demas and the medical kit and the specific unhurried efficiency of people who knew how to work in these conditions because they had been working in them for months.

’He came without being summoned,’ Lysander thought, watching Antiphus work. ’He heard and he came. That is what a functioning network looks like from the inside.’

’I built this. We built this. It is working.’

’It is also barely enough for what is arriving.’

He was at the registration point in the mid-afternoon, working through the cluster documentation with two of the settlement leaders who had come out from the organized buffer zone to help, when he heard someone behind him.

He turned.

Paris.

Standing at the edge of the registration area with his traveling cloak and the expression of a man who had heard something and come to see it for himself. Not dramatically — he was just there, looking at the beach, looking at the boats still arriving on the horizon, looking at the organized chaos of the registration process with the specific attention of someone assembling a picture.

’He came,’ Lysander thought. ’Nobody told him to come. He heard and he came.’

He went back to the registration work.

Paris moved to a position where he could see without being in the way and stayed there.

After a while he appeared at Lysander’s elbow.

"What do you need," he said.

Not: can I help. Not: what is happening. What do you need.

’He has been watching long enough to understand the operation,’ Lysander thought. ’And he is asking the operational question, not the observational one.’

"Translation," Lysander said. "Eastern section. The family group on the left — I cannot place the dialect."

Paris looked at the group. Listened to the sounds they were making.

"I can try," he said. "It sounds like a northern variant of the coastal Anatolian family. I picked up some of it from Kephon’s contacts."

"Try."

Paris went to the family group and crouched to their level and began speaking.

Not perfectly — Lysander could hear the hesitations, the moments where Paris tried a word and the family’s reaction told him it was wrong and he adjusted. But the family responded. The mother looked at Paris with the specific expression of someone who had been trying to communicate for hours and had suddenly found a partial bridge.

’He is not fluent,’ Lysander thought. ’He is not even close to fluent. But he is trying in their language rather than making them reach for his. That is worth more than fluency right now.’

’When did he learn that.’

’Kephon. Three months in an eastern trading house. He learned it from the work.’

’Of course he did.’

________________________________________

The sun was low when Hector rode back to the palace to report to Priam.

Miros stayed with the perimeter formation. Lysander stayed at the registration point. Paris stayed translating — badly, persistently, with the specific stubbornness of someone who had decided to be useful and was going to be useful regardless of how imperfect the attempt.

It was after the eighth hour when things began to slow.

Not end — slow. The boats on the horizon were fewer. The new arrivals had reduced to a trickle. The settlement registration had processed what it could process and the overflow was being directed to the expanded buffer zone with the help of the cluster leaders.

Lysander sat on a piece of driftwood and looked at the beach.

More than three hundred boats. He had lost count at some point in the afternoon and had not tried to recount. The number was the beach. The beach was the number.

Paris sat beside him.

They were quiet for a moment.

"The one that is not finished," Paris said. "The elder. She said there are more behind."

"Yes."

"How many more."

"I do not know."

Paris looked at the horizon. The last light on the water.

"When I was at Kephon’s house," he said, "there was a man who arrived from the far eastern interior. He had been moving for four months. He told me he had passed through six communities in that time. Each one emptying or already empty. He said — I remember this specifically — he said it looked like the world was folding from the east inward."

"The world folding inward," Lysander said.

"Yes."

They sat with that.

"I heard something," Paris said. "In the palace this morning. Before I came here."

"Tell me."

"One of the diplomatic attendants. The ones who were here with Pelonides’s delegation — he stayed behind for administrative reasons, completing something. He was talking to someone in the corridor. He mentioned a name."

"What name."

Paris was quiet for a moment.

Not hesitation — the pause of someone deciding how to say something precisely.

"Helen," he said. "He mentioned her in the context of the Spartan court. Something about the situation there being — his word was ’unstable.’ I do not know what he meant. But the name caught my attention."

Lysander looked at him.

"Why did it catch your attention."

Paris looked at the water.

"I do not know," he said. "It just did."

He stood.

"I am going back to continue with the eastern section family. They have not finished registering."

He went.

Lysander sat on the driftwood.

’Helen,’ he thought.

’An attendant from Pelonides’s delegation, staying behind for administrative reasons, mentioning Helen of Sparta in a corridor conversation. Describing the situation there as unstable.’

’And Paris heard it.’

’And Paris does not know why it caught his attention.’

’But I know.’

He looked at the beach. Three hundred boats. More coming. The world folding inward from the east.

And in the west, a name spoken in a corridor.

And Paris not knowing why he noticed it.

He picked up his shard.