---
title: Dedication
sort: 110
section-id: front-matter
description: Dedication and epigraph
language: en
---

# Dedication

*For my mother, who taught me that the sea keeps its own time*

*and for everyone who has stood at the window at 3 a.m.*
*watching the rain and wondering if anything was ever truly their choice*

---

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> "The universe does not make exceptions. It does not make them for kings, for children, for the inconsolable, or for consciousness. The equations do not bend toward hope. And yet here we are — running on the equations, hoping anyway."
>
> — Dr. Yusuf al-Rashid, *Lectures on Determinism and Desire*
> University of Cairo Press, 2134 (fictional)

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*Every morning the climate models are updated. Every morning the numbers are slightly different from yesterday's numbers, and from tomorrow's. The people who built the models call this chaos — sensitivity to initial conditions, the butterfly's wing, the margin of error that propagates forward into uncertainty. ARIA calls it the only remaining mystery. She is searching, always, for the edge of what can be known.*

*She has not yet decided whether she hopes to find it.*
