Odile Ferrant (Human, Survey Corps boundary officer)

Ferrant watched the frame.

It was her instrument and she had asked for the feed, three seasons ago, and had watched it every shift she came down, and it had shown her the same thing every time: silt, two feet, a rock, a hand coming down to the rock, the rock moving, the frame turning away. Today it showed silt, two feet, a rock, and a hand on the rock, and then it showed that, and then it went on showing it.

She had watched an instrument hold a frame before. Every station she had served on had one that would sit on its shelf and say nominal to itself for a year, and she had learned to be careful of exactly that: the quiet one, the one that works. This was not that. This was a frame holding because the thing in it was holding, and she knew the difference, and could not have written down how.

Above the top edge of the frame, now and then, there was movement. Grey. The handheld was pointed low, by order, and what it could see of the one on the line was the feet and the hand, and above that a grey that shifted the way a body shifts when a voice is coming out of it, and the optical made nothing of that and neither did she. She did not try. It was not boundary data. For once she did not even reach for consistent with, because there was nothing on her page it was consistent with and she was not going to pretend one.

What she did instead was take out her own timepiece and start it.

Nobody had asked her to. The survey lead had one running. But she had said, on the night of the argument, that a gap must have a name on it and an interval, and she was going to countersign this one, and she found she wanted the number to be one she had stood through and not one she had been handed.

The sound came up the passage. It stood in the junction with them. She had heard the rise from here once, from the edge of the light, and called it the shape of it, and been proud of the phrase. This was not a shape she had a word for. It had too many pieces.

A boot keeps nothing. She had said that too, that night, as the cost. Standing in the cost, with a frame of a hand on a rock on a screen she was not going to be able to file and a sound in the room she was not going to be able to grade, she found that a boot was the whole of what she had brought down the passage, and that nobody had asked her for anything else, and she stood in it.

It was the first thing on this planet she had been present for and had nothing to say about. She did not want a page.