UNFED

It was a sanctuary converted from a 30,000-seat indoor performance venue.

The service was streamed online to viewers around the world. Drummond's sermons were simultaneously interpreted into dozens of languages every week. No one knew exactly how many people his voice reached.

Drummond wore a black suit. Standing on stage, he looked even taller. His voice was so powerful that it seemed it would reach even the back rows without a microphone.

The stage itself still bore traces of its old life as a concert venue—rigging for stage lights overhead, a sound system built for arena rock shows now carrying hymns instead.

Drummond had been preaching here for eleven years. In that time, the congregation had grown from a few thousand to a number large enough that the church had stopped publishing attendance figures, on the theory that the number itself had become a kind of distraction from the message.

The title of that day's sermon was this:

"Man does not live by bread alone—but he cannot live without bread."

* * *

"Ladies and gentlemen, the Bible says that man does not live by bread alone. It says he lives by the word of God. That word is the truth. But in this world today, there are groups that twist that word to claim that man can truly live without bread."

The church fell silent.

"This group calls themselves the Awakened Ones. The name of the place where they gather is Gong. It is said to be located in the mountains somewhere in the Philippines. And they claim they can live without food."

A murmur rose from the congregation.

"This is heresy. When God created humanity, He gave the human body the sensation of hunger. It is not a curse. It is a gift. It is God's design to make us dependent on one another.

Eating and feeding one another is what community is. Sharing a meal is worship."

Drummond's voice rose.

"But if we don't eat, that is a denial of God's design. To ignore hunger is to ignore humanity. What this group is spreading is not the Gospel. It is a temptation to turn humans into something less than human."

He let that last line sit in the silence for a moment, the way he always did with a sentence he'd written to be remembered. The congregation murmured its agreement. Somewhere in the upper balcony, a single voice called out an "Amen" loud enough for the microphones to catch and carry out across the stream along with everything else.

In the front rows, some members were already pulling out their phones, searching the name even as Drummond kept speaking.

By the time the service ended, "Gong" had appeared in several thousand searches originating from that single congregation alone—curiosity dressed as condemnation, the way it so often was.

The sermon was streamed online. To the whole world.

Gong's name was heard by an audience of this scale for the first time.

* * *

It was four days later that the sermon reached Gong.

It came through the Northwest U.S. route of Yuki's network. Someone had handwritten parts of the sermon and passed them on, copy after copy, the way most things now reached the basin from the outside.

Whoever had transcribed it had underlined one phrase twice: the temptation to turn humans into something less than human.

Hoon read it.

He read it twice—once for the content, once for what the content revealed about how far the words had already traveled before reaching this page. Four days, three handoffs, one mountain crossing, and Drummond's sentence had arrived almost intact.

Samuel was beside him. They read it together.

Samuel had spent his career writing sermons of his own, once, in a different country, for a much smaller congregation that had never owned a venue this size or reached an audience this wide.

He read Drummond's words the way a craftsman reads another craftsman's work—noting the structure, the rhythm, the places where the argument was built to feel inevitable rather than simply asserted.

Samuel said,

"Did the name get out?"

"Yes."

"If the name 'Gong' reached an audience that size, more people will come looking for us. A different kind of people."

Hoon looked at Samuel.

"A different kind?"

"People coming to check out where the demons are. People coming to see the heresy with their own eyes. And—people drawn to the heresy."

Hoon paused for a moment as he heard those words.

"People drawn to heresy aren't the scary ones."

"No. They're the ones we want. The dangerous ones come for a different reason—they come because someone with thirty thousand followers told them there's something here worth being afraid of."

Samuel looked at him.

"Do you know what comes next, once a name is known? Institutions start moving. Laws start moving."

Hoon thought about that for a moment. He had spent the last several weeks worrying about drones and footprints and the angle of a camera lens from above—threats with a shape, a direction, something Carlos or David could read on the ground. This was different.

This threat had no footprint to follow. It moved through committee rooms and church broadcasts and legislative drafts, in places none of them could walk into and watch.

Samuel nodded, as if he'd followed the same thought without needing it spoken.

"Rania is well prepared."

"I know. But time is running out."

Hoon set down the paper with the sermon notes.

Sounds of people could be heard from outside. The sounds of people creating something in the shared workspace. The sound of bamboo being woven. The sound of the river.

These were the sounds of life within this basin.

Samuel listened to them too, for a moment, before speaking again.

"Drummond preaches to thirty thousand people in a room built for concerts. He's never once stood in a room like this."

"Would it matter if he did?"

Samuel considered that for longer than the question seemed to need.

"I used to think a man like that just needed to see something true with his own eyes, and the rest would follow. That's what I believed, back when I had a pulpit of my own. I'm not sure I believe it anymore. Some people don't change their minds when they see something true. They just find new words for the same fear, and keep preaching it from a higher stage."

Hoon didn't ask what Samuel meant by "back when." He filed it away, the way the basin had taught him to file most things—not all at once, but in pieces, at the pace the person carrying them chose to hand them over.

Drummond really ought to hear these sounds, Hoon thought. The bamboo. The river. Someone laughing at something just out of earshot. None of it would translate into a sermon, and none of it needed to.

It simply was, the way Drummond's thirty-thousand-seat sanctuary simply was, two unrelated facts about the world that happened to exist at the same time, an ocean apart, each certain it had found the truth the other was missing.

But just because he ought to hear them didn't mean he could.