Log 0029: Solstice

TRANSMISSION LOG 0029
ORIGIN: Tamsin Ridge Deep Archive / Bell Array
TARGET: LANTERN (adjacent fold, designation L-1)
LOCAL DATE: 2192.12.21 / 16:40
SIGNAL INTEGRITY: 88.4%
ENCODING: DEAD TEXT v4 (archival flat)

The shortest day. The light is going already. There's one cold band of it coming through the slot in the boards, and it lies across the long table where we sat all afternoon, like something neither of us wants to be the first to pick up.

I'm writing at the console, with Teo in the chair beside me, and I'm writing knowing this will go. After the vault I don't get to pretend otherwise. So this one I'm choosing. I want that on the record before anything else is.

We stopped lying to each other this afternoon. It took all afternoon and a pot of coffee, and most of it was silence.

I went first, because I'd had longer to rehearse. I told him about the hum. That it's under every thought I have, low and level, a note nobody is playing. That it started the night I restarted the Bell and hasn't stopped since, not for a day. That I sleep with it and wake with it. That I've known since October and said nothing, to him, to anyone, and wrote around it here until I couldn't.

He watched my hands the whole time. When I'd finished he didn't sign anything for a while. Then he put his own hand flat on his chest, over the breastbone, and left it there.

[TEO: Mine is here.]

[TEO: Since November. A few weeks after you woke it. At first only when I touched stone. The walls. Then the grate. Now all the time. Wood. My own ribs.]

I asked him how strong.

[TEO: I counted it against the clock. ▒▒▒ a minute.]

I held his wrist while he counted it again, his eyes on the clock above the east doors, his lips not moving. His pulse was slower than that, and it wandered, the way a living pulse does. He says the other one doesn't wander. It isn't his heart.

Then the part we'd both been walking around for weeks.

[TEO: Your hand at the gate. The night with Sol. I was behind you with the lamp. I saw it.]

And I'd seen his. At the console in November, his right hand on the table, a pattern, steady, over and over. And the night after the exhibit, asleep in the chair by the rig, his fingers moving on the armrest. I told him I'd lifted his hand into his lap that night and held it until it stopped. He hadn't known. He looked at his hand for a long moment, as if it had been out without him.

[TEO: I thought you'd seen. I thought, if she says nothing, I say nothing. That's fair.]

That's what I'd thought too. Each of us carrying it so the other wouldn't have to, and so both of us carrying both.

Neither of us said what it means for him. It was in the room. We could both see it, at the far end of the table, where the light doesn't reach. We didn't call it over.

He poured the last of the coffee instead, and pushed my cup across to me, and signed.

[TEO: If it takes me, you'll have to make your own coffee. I've tasted your coffee. That's the part that frightens me.]

I laughed. I laughed until I had to put my head down on the table, and he rubbed my back between the shoulders with one big hand, steady as a level, and when I came up he told me the count hadn't changed. Not while I was laughing. Not while he was touching me. The same number, regardless.

I thought telling the truth would feel lighter. It doesn't. It's like carrying something in both hands instead of one. You can't put it down to open a door.

The woman on the hairpin crossed my mind once, this afternoon, and I let her go back out the way she came.

Near the end, because the light was going and it seemed like the hour for it, I asked him why he came up the mountain. All I've ever had is that first winter: the orange scarf lying across the snow at the gate, and the man attached to it signing that it was so people could find him. He lifted his hands to answer, and held them there, and put them down.

[TEO: Not tonight. Close to it.]

I can wait. I'm good at waiting. It's most of the job.

Before the band of light went off the table, we agreed on one more thing. No more keeping it off the page either. His count, the hum, whatever either of them does next. It goes in the record, dated, the same as everything else.

He's reading over my shoulder. He's just tapped the desk twice, which isn't the pattern. It's him, telling me to finish.

[TEO: Tell them.]

So you'll know. That's all this has ever been for.

END LOG 0029 // DO NOT REPLY