Log 0031: The Slot

TRANSMISSION LOG 0031
ORIGIN: Tamsin Ridge Deep Archive / Bell Array
TARGET: LANTERN (adjacent fold, designation L-1)
LOCAL DATE: 2192.12.27 / 11:05
SIGNAL INTEGRITY: 66.0%
ENCODING: DEAD TEXT v4 (archival flat)

This isn't my hour. I know. I'm writing now because if I wait for three in the morning I'll have had sixteen hours to decide what I saw, and I'd rather you had it before I've tidied it.

I went to the slot this morning.

Twenty steps. I've known the number since Teo boarded the window, and I'd never once counted them. This morning I counted them on the way, and I'd like to say it was to keep my mind busy. It was so I'd know how many there were to come back.

The light was the flat kind the snow makes when the sky is the same color as the ground. They were singing. I could feel it before I reached the window, a grain in the air, and when I laid my palm on the boards it was there in the wood, steady, the way it was in November. I put my face to the slot.

They stopped.

All of them, the way they did for me before, every voice on the bend at once. The boards went still under my hand. I don't know why they do that. I've decided not to guess on the record.

In daylight you can see them properly. That's the difference, and it's the whole difference. By moonlight they're a grey line on the hairpin and you can tell yourself it's a fence. This morning they were people. More than I let myself count, standing in the snow with their faces turned up the mountain, toward the window, toward me, and none of them moving, because there was nothing to move to.

One of them was moving.

Toward the back, where the road bends, taller than the ones around her. She stood the way the others don't. Not slack. Upright, weight even, as if she'd been asked to wait and had agreed to. And one hand was raised to about the height of her shoulder, and it was keeping time. Small, even strokes. Down and across. For a sound that nobody on that mountain was making.

At that distance I couldn't tell you which hand. I tried. I want that written down too: I tried, and I couldn't.

I'll tell you what I think, because everything I've written you has been true as far as it went, and I'm not going to soften this. I think it's ██████████.

I won't put her name next to that hand.

What I have instead is the film, and the years of shift meetings. She'd stand at the head of the table in the briefing hall with her right hand going, keeping time with whatever she was building in the air, and the newer ones would watch the hand and lose the thread, and she'd stop, push her glasses up with one knuckle, and start the sentence again, slower, for them. I always followed the sentence. I was proud of that.

I stood there too long.

I knew it while I was doing it. My face was at the slot and the mountain was silent and I watched the hand, down and across, down and across, and I couldn't make myself be the one who stopped first.

Then I stepped back, and they began again. [SIGNAL LOSS 00:02.1] It came through the boards into my palm and up my arm, muffled, the way the stone muffles everything here, and I stood with my hand flat on the wood and let it.

keep time keep time keep

I don't know how long. Long enough. When Teo found me I was still standing there with my hand on the window and my eyes shut, and I didn't hear him come, which is a thing that has never happened to me in his company.

He didn't sign. He took my wrist off the boards the way he lifts a pan off the stove, quick and sure, and held it until I looked at him. Then he walked me back. Twenty steps. I didn't count them. He did, I think. His lips moved.

I'm at the console now, in my chair, with a blanket I didn't fetch over my knees. My hands are slow. Each letter costs a little more than the last, and I can still feel it in my wrist, under where his hand was. It'll pass. It has before.

Before I sat down I asked him to look. He went to the slot and stood there a long while with his face to it, and came back and set one hand flat on the table between us and showed me what he'd seen. Down and across.

The hand kept going after I stepped away.

END LOG 0031 // DO NOT REPLY