Field Officer Sunniva Holm (Human, operations watch)

The band came up in the hour after, and she nearly did not log it, because she had been awake for thirty-one hours and the field instruments were, for the first time since the fourteenth hour, showing her nothing wrong.

It was not nothing wrong. It was the absence of a particular kind of wrong. Every field trace on the post ran ragged near a turn, the way a sea runs after the wind has dropped, and she had watched the ragged edge settle for twenty minutes and was writing field traces settling when one of them did not settle and did something else. A narrow band. Harmonic. It did not wander. It sat in its band the way the lower housing sat at twenty-six seconds, as if it had been there all along and the ragged edge had been hiding it, and it was so gentle that her first thought was that an instrument had found a resonance in its own mount.

She checked the mount. The mount was sound.

She pulled the anomaly register, which was the thing a watch did with a trace it had no entry for, and the register had an entry for it. She read the entry twice. It was a field-signature entry, old, cross-referenced to boundary stations she had not served on, in two Concordants, and it described her band to the width, and the name on it was the Turquoise Dove, which was not a classification and not an instrument designation. It was the kind of name a watch gives a thing on a long night and then cannot take back. She looked up from it at the Starwarden's back, at the viewport, where he had been standing since before the turn with his hands at his sides, and found she did not want to be the one who said the name aloud on his post.

"Starwarden. Field trace. Narrow band, settled, and the register has it." She gave the entry number. "Nine minutes so far."

He did not turn round for a time she could have logged and did not. Then he came to the desk and read the entry standing, and read the trace, and asked her for the mount check, and she gave it to him, and he nodded as though the mount check were the interesting part.

"Unclassified transient," he said. "Band and duration. Attach the entry."

"Under its—"

"Under the band." He said it without any weight at all. "The register's name is a name for a readout. We have a readout. We don't have the rest of what the entry is for."

She logged it as he said. Nine minutes became fourteen and then the band was not there, and the field traces were ragged and ordinary, and the post had, as far as the log would ever show, one more unclassified transient than it had had that morning, which she had been told at her briefing was the thing this post was known for. The Starwarden went back to the viewport. He had not, she realised, written anything down in the hour since the turn, and the window was his to write up, and he had never in her month on the post let a thing sit unwritten for an hour.

She wrote the name on her own pad, under the entry number, because she would want to know which one it had been. Then she tore the sheet off and put it in her pocket and did not file it, and could not have said why that was the right thing, except that it was his post.