Chief Ingrid Halvorsen (Human, Survey Corps)

The floor took nine days, and the line came out to the corridor on a sheet, as the line always did.

She read it standing. Three sources: audited, certified unchanged by transit. Bench braided on the floor: within budget. Carried value, surveyed membrane, Counterpane, seventh revisit: reading. Width of one membrane. Confirmed. Three initials she knew and one she did not, and a date, and under the date nothing, which was where the Survey's three words had gone fourteen years before and where nothing had needed to go since.

Seven. The shape that was not ours had held for a seventh time, drawn to its own rule exactly, and the floor that had never left had said so, and now it was a reading, and she had not been in the room. She preferred it that way. She had preferred it five times before and found that the preference had not worn.

The sheet did not say who had carried the bench to the door. It was not a sheet that said that. It did not say that somebody had sat on a crate at the shelter's cold end with a source in her ears, or that the source had sounded like a source. That was in the department's log, which was in the Archive now, whole, with a Chief Ranger's last initial under its last line, and the Archive would hold the log beside this sheet without saying that the two were about the same morning, because the Archive did not say things like that, and did not need to.

She folded the sheet once. What she had carried home for the sixth time went home with her for the sixth time, since the floor had not been handed it and could not have been. It was not a Survey question, and this was the Survey's floor, and the one person who might have had the standing to be asked it had gone out of a door nine days ago without asking when the line would come.

She did not know whose question it was. She had begun to think that the not knowing was the reading.