Elvira (Krenyi, learned here)

She wrote it that evening, under the date and under the time, which she took from the shelf, to the second, and which was the first time a line in this book had had a second on it.

She did not write Krenyi. The word was the file's and the finding was the station's and she had told the survey man she would rather have the finding; until she had it, what she had was his hand, and she wrote his hand.

Cut the heel of my hand on a flint, 09:14 station time, seating the Corps' clock. Blood on the case. The survey man took the case bare-handed and the blood raised a mark on him along its own line, red, a little proud, stinging; he says he has had it before, once, from a cut he helped dress, and was told what it was by the one whose blood it was. The file has a name for it. My cut was closed before I found a cloth. It always has been. I was told as a girl that I healed well. The sage dressed my knee in gloves when I was nine and said the salve stained; I did not test it. The station will have a sample when it asks. I have not asked what I am. I have asked what the file wants.

She read it back. It was the longest entry in the book and it was all measurement, and she let it stand.

Then she turned the page, because there was a second thing, and it went in the column for observations she had not intended to make.

Three years of standing in this and not being afraid. I filed it as a flaw, and then as a practice. What I was taught to look under, and by whom, and why, is still not in this book. What was under me is.

She closed the book. On the shelf the clock kept the station's time, to the second, in a room that had gone three years without one, and she looked at it for a while, and then she went out to the stones to reset the circle, which would fail, correctly, as it had the night before, with one more thing in the room that could be measured.