The Fourth Section

Julian carried the case by its handle, not tucked under his arm. The road to the flood gate was wet from overnight rain, and the handle’s cold edge kept shifting against his fingers as he walked. He had left the photographs, the torn recorder strip, and his notebook behind. The fragment was the only thing he had brought.

He had not decided what would count as an answer. If the gate took the fragment and it came out on the far side, that would show the passage still worked. It would not explain what the grid wanted, or why TOMORROW had been cut into the metal. He could accept that much. He needed one answer he could see without building a map around it.

The access path descended through grass and loose stone. Water moved in the ditch beside it, slow and brown, carrying bits of reed toward the culvert. At the gate, the slab looked as it had when he last left it: a long, low shape sunk into the bank, its face dark with moisture. The upstream seam was narrow enough that he could not see past its lip.

He set the case on a dry patch of concrete and opened it. Inside, the smaller case held the wrapped fragment. He unwrapped it carefully, making sure the cloth stayed with him. COLE showed first, its letters dulled by water and handling. The crack ran through the edge of the metal. On the reverse, TOMORROW was still legible.

The word bothered him more in daylight. It had the bluntness of an instruction, but it gave him no instruction he could test. He closed his hand around the fragment, feeling its ordinary weight. Then he put it down beside the case and went to the downstream bend.

The gridded surface lay beyond the culvert mouth, past the place where a person could stand on ordinary concrete. He stayed outside its boundary. The water had thinned to a sheen there, making the lines on the surface appear and disappear when he shifted his head. The four-part mark was visible. Three shallow sections caught the light. The fourth, which had been smooth when he first saw it, held the cut beneath the place where his boot had entered.

He leaned forward without crossing. The cut remained, narrow and dark, its edges too straight to be a crack. The water on the grid gathered along its edges rather than filling it. Nothing had grown over it. Nothing had closed it.

Julian straightened. His first urge was to photograph the cut, then compare the new image to the ones he had kept separate. There was no camera in his hands. He had left it behind on purpose. A record would help, he thought, and then he stopped himself. He knew what he had come to test. He could either make this one observation cleanly or turn it into another collection of angles that wanted to become a single picture.

He returned to the case. The slab’s upstream seam waited above the waterline. Julian crouched and slid the fragment toward it, keeping his fingers on the metal until its leading edge met the narrow gap. The seam took the light from the letters. For a moment, COLE and TOMORROW were both visible, one on each side of the stone’s dark lip.