The Case Without an Address
By morning, the mud on Julian’s boots had dried into the seams. He scraped it off over the sink, then laid the boots beneath the table with their toes pointed away from the case holding the fragment.
He had given himself until noon to decide what to do with it. The hour was an invention, not a deadline. Still, he watched the light move across the kitchenette wall as if it might tell him when he was done.
The fragment sat wrapped in cloth inside a small metal case. He had put it there the night before without marking the lid. COLE and TOMORROW were inside with it, along with the crack and the weight of the thing. Nothing else.
His photographs were elsewhere: two camera cards in separate envelopes, each sealed and stored in a different pocket of his field bag. He had not copied them to the same drive. He had not matched their image sequences by time. One camera had been set near the culvert, the other carried by hand. They showed different angles, and he could feel the temptation to make them into one account just by looking from one envelope to the other.
He left them shut.
The torn mechanical strip lay on the table, its ragged ends pointing toward each other. He turned one piece over. The recorder’s line stopped where he had torn it, and the rest of the ink was there on the other half, but he did not lay them together. The tear had cost him continuity. It had also kept the record from becoming a single clean track through the event.
He put each piece in its own paper sleeve.
Sayo knocked once, then opened the door when he called. She had brought the inspection form in a plastic folder. There was a brown water mark at one corner and a neat crease across the middle.
“You’re packing,” she said.
“Sorting.”
“Looks like packing.” She set the folder on a clear patch of counter, well away from his bag. “I need to finish the inspection note before the office asks why I spent half a day at a closed gate.”
Julian nodded toward the folder. “What are you putting in?”
“What I saw. The slab, the water direction, the surface past the bend. The metal hanging over the grid. The line appearing when you stepped.” She opened the form and scanned her own handwriting. “I’m not calling it a chamber or a measurement device.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“You did ask me to watch because you thought it would prove something.”
He felt the impulse to correct her, then caught it before it left his mouth. “I wanted an independent witness.”
“You wanted somebody else to see what you expected to see.”
Next
Julian will return to the flood gate with the fragment kept apart from his records and find out whether the passage can take it back—and whether the fourth cut remains.