“It wasn’t the relief,” Kaito said.
He had seen my expression.
I corrected it. Or tried to.
Across the table, Aoi leaned forward.
“Who?”
“I never saw them clearly.”
“Where?”
“Across the river. An old watch platform. I thought it was abandoned.”
Leth brought tea. No one thanked her immediately. She set the cups down anyway.
Kaito wrapped both hands around his.
“There was a shutter code in the field case. Simple one. Numbers, directions, acknowledgments. I’d been told to signal every two hours after dark.”
“What message?” I asked.
He looked at me.
I stopped.
“Sorry. Continue.”
For a moment, he seemed surprised by the retreat.
Then he answered.
“Station occupied. Awaiting relief.”
Aoi closed her eyes.
“They knew,” she said.
“We don’t know that,” I said quietly.
She opened them.
I nodded toward Kaito.
“Let him tell it.”
He drank.
His hands shook against the cup.
The answer across the river had not matched the instructed response.
Kaito had signaled again. The other light repeated itself.
Three short openings. A pause. One long.
Then darkness.
“I thought I’d copied the code wrong,” he said. “There were notes in the back. Different marks. Older ones.”
“Could you read them?”
“Some.”
“What did they say?”
He looked at Aoi.
“Don’t use the lower door after dusk.”
No one moved.
“The station had two doors,” he continued. “One onto the road. One down toward the river steps. I’d been using the lower one to fetch water.”
“What did you do?” Aoi asked.
“Barricaded it.”
“Because of a light?”
“Because something had scratched at it the night before.”
His voice remained controlled. That made the details worse.
He had dragged furniture against the door. Moved his food upstairs. Filled every vessel he could find.
On the third night, something hit the lower entrance hard enough to split the frame.
“I stayed above the stairs.”
Aoi stared at him.
“I put the stove sideways across the landing. Burned the broken stools. I thought if I kept enough light--”
He stopped.
Leth moved beside him.
Not touching.
Near enough.
Kaito breathed.
Continued.
“The light across the river stayed on.”
“Signaling?” I asked.
“Sometimes.”
“Did you answer?”
“Yes.”
“What did it say?”
“Mostly the same things. Stay above. Wait for morning. There’s a way north.”
“Your side of the river?”
“Yes.”
He had found an old service path marked beneath the station’s drainage plan.
At dawn, after the animal stopped trying the stairs, he climbed out of the upper window.
He carried the signal lamp because it was the only useful thing he had left. The field book went inside his shirt. The food was gone.
For two days, he followed the river. Vale found him beside a lime road.
The light across the water had guided him past a collapsed bridge the first evening. He never learned who held it.
Aoi was crying.
Quietly.
She looked furious with herself.
Kaito saw.
His face changed.
“Don’t.”
She laughed without humor.
“That’s useful.”
“I mean... I’m here.”
“I know.”
“I’m all right.”
“No, you’re not.”
He looked away.
She wiped her eyes with her sleeve.
Neither spoke for a while.
I stared at the steam rising from my cup.
There were questions waiting. Military ones. Political ones. The identity of whoever occupied the opposite bank. Whether the station had been selected because it was unsafe or because someone expected it to receive signals. I could feel them crowding toward my mouth.
Aoi had not crossed the road to deliver me an interrogation subject.
I drank the tea. It had gone almost cold.
Later, Kaito brought out the field book.
Its cover had warped. Several pages were smoke-stained. Writing filled the margins in two scripts.
Japanese. And the local hand.
He placed it in front of Aoi, not me.
“I wrote down the times.”
She turned the first page.
Routine entries. Lamp checked. Water fetched.
No relief.
The handwriting changed as the days passed. Less even. Larger in places.
At the edge of one page, a sentence had been written so hard that the paper nearly tore.
Aoi read it. Her face went still.
I did not lean closer.
She closed the book halfway.
“What do you want done with this?” she asked.
Kaito looked at her.
Apparently nobody had asked him that in quite those terms.
“Will it help?”
“Yes,” I said.
Both turned toward me.
I kept the answer narrow.
“It can corroborate your account. The times may be checked against movements and signals. I cannot promise what an office will do with it.”
“Corvane’s office?”
“Not first.”
I explained Stonecross. The examiner. Berden’s stay. The recovered equipment. The missing personnel finding.
Kaito listened without interrupting. When I finished, he looked down at the book.
“If they find out where I am--”
“We can copy selected pages without naming this place,” I said. “The examiner can take evidence here if she agrees. Or you can refuse.”
“And then?”
“Then we work with what we already have.”
He studied me.
“You’d do that?”
I thought of the people in the capital who had described Aoi as an investment.
“Yes.”
I waited for his answer.
Kaito did not decide that evening.
Leth gave us beds in an empty cottage and informed us that the roof leaked near the left wall. I put my belongings on the right.
Aoi sat on her bed holding the blue cloth. For a while, she turned it between her fingers.
Then she said, “He’s alive.”
“Yes.”
“I kept thinking that if I found him, I’d know what to do.”
I sat on the other bed.
Outside, someone laughed near the main house. A pan struck a stove. The ordinary business of supper continued.
“What did you think you would do?”
“Take him away.”
“From here?”
“I didn’t know there was a here.”
She looked at the small window. Beyond it, warm light showed beneath Kaito’s door.
There was food waiting for him. Work he had chosen. People who had not asked what his gift could do before allowing him to stay.
Aoi folded the cloth.
“He said he missed me.”
I waited.
“I was angry anyway.”
“That seems permissible.”
She looked at me.
“Do you have a rule for everything?”
“Fewer than I arrived with.”
She lay back carefully. After a while, her breathing steadied.
I remained awake.
Across the river from a station abandoned by the crown, someone had kept a light burning for a boy they could not reach.
I wanted to know who. For once, I was content to wait until morning to ask.