Chapter 175

Chapter 175: Chapter 175

The Director’s reply took three days to arrive, which told Edvyn something on its own — a man who had answered every previous correspondence within a day of receiving it had needed this one longer than usual, and Edvyn read the opening lines already braced for what that delay meant.

I have lost time at the Fallow. More than once. I did not report it, because I did not understand it as separate from the work I was sent to do, and because admitting to gaps in my own observation felt, at the time, like undermining the reliability of everything else I’d recorded. I see now that the omission may have done more damage than the honesty would have.

He set the letter down for a moment before continuing, because he wanted the first sentence to finish settling before the second one arrived to complicate it.

The first instance I can identify was in early February. Perhaps a minute, possibly longer. I attributed it to fatigue, the same as I imagine your Ilvar Cen did. There have been at least four more since, that I’m aware of, each slightly longer than the last, the most recent lasting what I estimate to be three or four minutes, two weeks ago. I noted the date of that one in my official log, but recorded it as a period of "deep observation," because that was the language Perpetuity trained me to use for moments when the watching consumed more of me than I expected.

Edvyn. I need you to understand what I am about to say is not certain, only possible, and I would not say it at all if the possibility weren’t serious enough to outweigh my reluctance to say it. Some of what I have reported to you and to Perpetuity as evidence of change at the Fallow — the texture I described as "less hollow," the quality I called settling rather than absence — may not have been the Fallow changing. It may have been what was happening to me, mistaken for what I was sent to watch for.

I have spent forty years of my professional life trained to distrust easy explanations for unusual phenomena, and I find myself unable to apply that training to my own account of the last two months. I do not know whether that is because the training has finally failed me, or because something at this site specifically resists being examined by the person it is happening to. I would value your judgment more than my own, at present.

Edvyn read the closing line twice. It was, as far as he could remember, the first time in months of correspondence that the Director had asked for anyone’s judgment over his own, and the admission unsettled him more than the gaps themselves had.

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Doven read it over Edvyn’s shoulder in silence, and when he finished, he didn’t say anything for long enough that Caelen finally prompted him.

"Say it."

"I was about to offer to go," Doven said. "The way I tested Halven. Someone needs to go to the Fallow who knows what to look for now, who can sit there deliberately and let Caelen read what’s actually happening instead of relying on a man reporting on himself from inside the experience." He looked at Edvyn directly. "I don’t think it should be the Director. He’s already compromised, by his own account. It should be someone who wasn’t there for months beforehand, with nothing already tangled into what they’re observing."

"It should not be you again, not this soon." Edvyn heard the edge in his own voice and didn’t try to soften it. "Three days ago you were sitting motionless on a hillside experiencing something none of us understood, and you came out of it changed in ways we still haven’t finished assessing. I’m not sending you to a second site a week later because it’s convenient that you’ve already done it once."

"Then who. Caelen reads, he doesn’t receive. You’re the Attendant, and I don’t know what a site like this does to someone already oriented toward eleven other positions. The Director is compromised. Ilvar Cen’s exposure was accidental and we don’t know if deliberate exposure would behave the same way in him." Doven’s voice stayed level, but Edvyn recognized the particular stubbornness underneath it, the same quality that had kept him at the stones alone for three weeks before any of them knew to stop him. "I’m not offering because it’s easy. I’m offering because I’m the only person in this conversation who has direct, recent, embodied knowledge of what ten seconds of it feels like from the inside, and that knowledge is the only advantage any of us currently has against going in blind."

Caelen didn’t argue the logic, which Edvyn understood, with some discomfort, to be its own kind of agreement.

"Not yet," Edvyn said finally. "We write back to the Director first. We get a fuller account of what he’s lost and when, and we cross-reference it against everything he’s already sent us about the Fallow, the way Caelen suggested. If his reports from the last two months need to be unwound from what actually happened to him, that has to happen before anyone goes there to add a sixth or seventh data point to a record we can’t yet trust the first five of."

Doven didn’t agree outright, but he didn’t argue further either, and Edvyn took the silence as the kind of concession a tired, recently-tested man gives when he knows the caution is reasonable even if he doesn’t fully want to honor it.

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He wrote to the Director that evening with three requests: a complete, dated list of every lost interval he could reconstruct, however uncertain; a copy of every report he had sent to Perpetuity since January, so the network could begin separating observation from artifact; and an instruction, repeated from his last letter and underlined this time, to stop going to the Fallow alone under any circumstances until someone could be there with him.

He did not mention Doven’s offer. He wanted to know what four months of contaminated data actually contained before he decided whether sending anyone, however prepared, was worth doing at all.

Norre brought tea in sometime after he’d finished sealing the letter, and set it down without comment, the way she’d learned to move through rooms where the three of them were working through something she had no part in and no need to be told about. Edvyn thanked her, and sat with the cooling cup a long while afterward, thinking about the Director’s last line — I would value your judgment more than my own — and about how strange it was that a man trained for forty years to distrust easy answers had needed someone four days’ ride away to tell him his own account of his own life might not be reliable.

He thought, too, about what it meant that Perpetuity’s entire institutional purpose, redirected after the exchange’s completion, had rested on the assumption that the Director’s observations at the Fallow were clean — a single trained witness, alone, watching for the first sign that forty years of failure had finally ended. If even part of what he’d reported turned out to be his own unrecognized exposure rather than the site itself, then Perpetuity’s new purpose had been built, however briefly, on the same kind of unexamined certainty that had let Doven strain alone at Halven for three weeks before anyone thought to ask what the straining was actually doing to him.

He didn’t write any of that down. It wasn’t a conclusion yet, only a discomfort he intended to keep carrying until the Director’s full account arrived and either confirmed it or proved him wrong.

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