Oren woke to gray light coming through the little window over his bed.
For a while he thought of nothing.
Same ceiling, same water stain shaped like a boot, the smell of wood gone damp from the rain that had come at dawn, Marin banging something around in the kitchen.
He sat up, reached for the shirt on the chair, and his hand hit something hard in the pocket of the coat lying beside him.
He pulled it out without thinking.
The device.
Cold, the way he remembered it, the dial dim, that small grip.
His.
He knew he had taken it from somewhere and had no idea when he’d decided to, or why.
He turned it over a few times.
Then he looked at the desk, and the folded page was there under the lamp, where he’d left it.
He had put that lamp out himself before he slept.
He opened it.
His own handwriting, a bit cramped, the way it got when he was tired.
“If you are reading these lines…” He read it twice.
The shirt was still in his other hand.
He didn’t try to push his memory this time; he’d done that last night and all he got was a headache.
He just sat there with the page.
Someone had wanted this morning to go exactly like this, no memory, no real fear, only a page and a device and a question, and that someone was him.
He kept coming back to that.
It didn’t shock him.
It sat on him the way a wet coat does.
He folded the page into the inner pocket of his jacket and the device into the other, pulled on the shirt, buttoned it wrong, redid it, and went out to the kitchen.
Marin was pouring hot water into two cups with her back to him.
“You slept late.
I heard you thumping around in there a while ago.” “I didn’t sleep well.” She looked at him then, the quick look she gave whenever his voice sounded off.
“Because of yesterday?” He didn’t know if she meant the Rite or something else, so he nodded.
“Nobody sleeps after a day like that.” She handed him his cup, the one with the chipped rim, always his, and sat across from him with both hands wrapped around her own.
“On the way back I heard a woman say the man from the tavern had a little girl up in the northern village.
Could be nothing.” “I didn’t know he had a daughter.” “Me neither.
She sounded sure, though.
Like she’d known him for years.” A shrug.
“Anyway.
The cloth.
Don’t forget it this time.
I’m coming with you, I want to see it with my own eyes.” He smiled, couldn’t help it.
“You don’t trust me.” “I don’t trust you with colors,” she said, dead serious, and took his cup away before he’d finished it.
They went out into the narrow stone street that led toward the center of the village.
The air still had the chill of the night in it, though the sun was just over the rooftops.
The village had gone back to normal fast, faster than he liked.
Doors open, shutters going up one after another, a woman pegging wet laundry on a line strung between two windows and arguing with someone inside.
The bakery came first.
You smelled it before you saw the door.
The baker stood behind his wooden counter, flour up to the elbows.
“Two days and not a loaf,” he said, handing Marin two.
“I thought you’d found another baker.” “We were busy.” “Everyone was busy yesterday.” He said it lighter than the words deserved, and started weighing a sack of flour for the next customer.
“My son says wheat’s gone up again.
I can’t hold the loaf at this price much longer, I’m telling you.
And my knee’s killing me in this weather.” “Salt’s worse than last month,” said a man waiting behind them, not looking at anyone.
“Two pieces at that price, and don’t ask me for a third.” The baker nodded and turned to whoever was next.
They walked on past the smithy, the hammer going at its steady beat.
The blacksmith, big arms, looked younger to Oren than the blacksmith he had seen dead in the square yesterday morning.
He was bent over a horseshoe on the anvil.
He glanced up, nodded, went back to it.
At the corner of the small square some children were kicking around a ball of stuffed cloth, one of them screaming that it was a foul, and two women sat on a stone bench talking low.
Oren only caught pieces as he went by.
“…said she saw them carrying them out of the square before anyone was even up.” “It’s always like that.
They never leave it for people to see.” “Poor young blacksmith.
He fixed my storeroom door just last week.” They didn’t lower their voices as Oren and Marin passed.
One of them was already on to her sister’s husband and some business with a goat.
At the weaver’s they stayed a long time.
Marin held one piece to the light from the door, then another, blue against blue.
“This one.” “No, this one.” Oren stood near the entrance and watched the street.
A man went by in a plain military uniform, dust to the knees, walking like his legs were about to quit on him.
Someone on a step said hello.
He lifted a hand and kept going toward the courthouse at the top of the square.
Marin paid, wrapped the cloth in an older piece of fabric so it wouldn’t get dusty, and they headed for the circular road around the great square, the one that passed the old statue at the entrance.
It had been there since before Oren was born.
Stone, the face worn down, a man standing upright with his right hand held out.
Stop or give, Oren had never worked out which.
He’d never thought about it, no more than about any other stone he walked past every day.
“That’s Alden,” he said, seeing her glance at it.
“Who’s Alden?” “No idea, really.
My grandfather said he saved the village.
A long time ago.” He tried to think of more and there wasn’t any.
“I don’t think anyone remembers the story.
He’s just there.
Always has been.” She nodded and looked once more at the worn face, and then she spotted a vendor with red apples, the first good ones in weeks, and that was the end of Alden.
Oren walked her home and told her he’d stop by the Archive, he’d left something unfinished.
She didn’t ask what.
He did that sometimes on rest days.
In daylight the Archive was another place.
Sun came through the high windows at a slant and lit up the dust hanging in the air, and somewhere far off a single guard was walking his rounds.
Nobody in the eastern section.
Official work was suspended for the Rite, but the outer door stayed open for staff who might need to come back, and he had counted on that.
He went straight to the table where he’d sat last night.
The second crate was still there, untouched.
He took out the bundle tied with black thread, sat down, and read it again.
The words hadn’t changed.
The stiff formal language, numbers where names should be, the response indicators, the success rates.
But it didn’t hit him.
Yesterday he had ended up on the floor with his ears ringing.
Now he read the line, “Individuals for whom the first session fails are transferred to the Second Register, and their names are not mentioned again thereafter,” and it bothered him about as much as any odd sentence would.
That was all.
Something between the words and him had gone missing overnight.
He kept reading anyway, slower, stopping on the small details he’d rushed past the first time.
It wasn’t one report.
It was a stack of separate sheets, each with its own date and case numbers, and at the foot of every page the same little notation: “Monthly Session.” He stopped there.
Monthly session.
It wasn’t a strange phrase.
It was what everyone in the village called the Rite, the one at the start of the month, the one where three people had died in front of him yesterday.
But here, between the numbers and the dry notes, it looked different.
He started over from the top.
First session, second register, monthly session.
They were no longer separate the way they’d been the night before.
They started lining up, and the line ran from the document to the Rite, to the square, to the lamp that had changed color, to the device in his pocket.
He didn’t have a conclusion.
He didn’t know what the “first session” was or what happened to people sent to the “second register.” But he suspected it, hard enough that his chest tightened again, less than last night, and he suspected this wasn’t about some far-off village.
It was about here.
Once a month, in front of everyone.
He turned to the last page, the one he hadn’t reached before, having stopped at the first line and gone no further.
It was slightly off from the rest, narrower margins, as if added later.
At the bottom, a small number in a finer hand, and next to it a symbol he didn’t recognize at first.
Three letters, two digits.
He looked at it for a long time.
He knew it from somewhere.
Not from the document.
Somewhere older, his daily work at the Archive, records that had passed through his hands a hundred times without his looking at them twice.
He got up and went to the shelves for his own village’s records, the ones he handled nearly every day, and found it almost at once, without really knowing he was looking for it.
The same symbol, three letters and two digits, printed in the corner of the village’s tax record, a ledger at least twenty years old, next to a small administrative seal he had never once asked about.
He’d always assumed it was some internal classification, like any other.
He stood between the shelves with the two records in his hands.
One from the crate of the distant village, one from his own.
He didn’t know what the symbol meant or why it was in both places.
But the question in his head had changed.
It wasn’t what happened to that other village anymore.
It was much closer than that.
Why were these documents here at all, among the records of his own village?