Elvira

She read for eleven minutes without speaking.

Galahad let her. He did not fill the silence with the kind of reassurance that would have made the moment about his discomfort rather than her information, and she noted this and revised her model of him upward again, in the small, exact way she revised things that had already earned a high rating.

The archive was worse than she had expected and more useful than anything she had been given in three years. Six stations. Two unexplained. A drift that had been quietly incident-coded for over a decade because "boundary instrument fault" was a phrase that closed files instead of opening questions. A model, current as of this morning, connecting her causeway to a station a kilometre and a half away by a ratio that meant her failures had never been local at all.

She understood, reading it, precisely how much she had not known, and — more usefully — precisely what shape the not-knowing had taken. Ambiguity was not an absence. It was a specific, textured thing, and now that she could see its edges she could see where it had been sitting.

Not in the chalk. Not in the thread.

In the question she had never asked, because she had never thought to ask it of something that could not, by any classification she used, be asked anything at all.

She turned toward the reeds, where a particular quality of stillness had been present, at a slight distance, every single night for three years without her once addressing it directly.

"Aldera."

The stillness did not move immediately. When it did, it was unhurried — a cat choosing to be seen rather than being caught at it.

"You have been here longer than I have," Elvira said. "You know what this is. Not the method. I have that now, finally, from him." A short breath. "I am asking you to tell me the rest. All of it. What is feeding, and on what, precisely, and what stops it."

She had never said the sentence I am asking you to Aldera before. She had spoken near her, around her, past her, in the accumulated habit of three years of treating a watching cat as company rather than as an instrument. It cost her something small and specific to say it plainly. She said it plainly anyway, because plainness was the entire point.