Hesper Nakagawa (Human, Survey Lead, Fliade survey)

The log said nothing happened. Nakagawa read it every evening and it said so every evening, in Aravena's voice, at the end of the shift's entry, exactly as ordered: Nothing happened. And under it, in the file where only the survey lead wrote, Nakagawa kept the count of how many times that had been true.

It was a plain number and it went up by one a shift. Egede thought it was a joke that had gone on too long. It was not a joke. A survey that has been shown a thing it does not understand has two choices, and one of them is to do something about it, and the other is to write down, carefully, for as long as it takes, that it has not. Nakagawa had chosen the second, and the count was the second, made visible.

But a log that says nothing happened is not the same as a log with nothing in it. Nakagawa read the unit's channels every evening beside the count, and the channels were full.

The boulders, first. The survey had logged them since the first month: a shift of rock somewhere below the margin, felt more than heard, and then, after an interval the party had long since learned to measure, the thermal profiles at the margin gone. The adults withdrawing. The party had logged it so many times that nobody saw it any more, the way you stop seeing a door you go through every day.

Nakagawa laid the shifts out in a row and looked at them for a while.

One on every arrival. Not some. Every arrival of the party in the upper levels had a boulder shift before it, below the margin, before the party was anywhere in sight of the margin — before, Nakagawa checked, the party's light could have been seen from it. And then the withdrawal, by the interval. Two years of it. They announced themselves every single time, and then they left the place to the party, every single time.

And the party had walked in, every single time, without a sound that meant anything, and never once done the same.

Nakagawa did not file that as a finding. Nakagawa filed it as an observation, in the plainest words there were: the party has never announced itself. Then sat with it.

Then the sound channel, which Nakagawa had been reading for some shifts now and had told nobody about. At the end of every shift, after the others' voices had gone up the passage and faded, there was one voice left at the bottom, low, and it said a short thing that went up at the end, and then there was a long quiet, longer than anybody waits for anything, and then footsteps going up.

Was that all right?

Nakagawa knew whose voice it was. Nakagawa had said nothing to Aravena, and was not going to, yet, because a thing said to the dark is not a thing said to the survey lead, and a survey lead who cannot tell the difference has stopped being one.