Thirteen-year-old Tavi shows Imran the careful chalk-and-charcoal notebook he has kept for ten days, recording the exact morning and evening hours. Just then, the beetle colony reversed direction. Standing inside the low stone bench beside the Tanner’s Row air-flow grate, Thirteen-year-old Tavi and Imran Bell set Tavi’s stitched butcher-paper field book filled with neat charcoal sketches of beetle columns and marginal bell-tower timestamps where the lantern light fell cleanest across the work surface. Meanwhile, Pella Rook and Retired Lock Operator Renn Vos checked the entry under the heading of Tavi’s Notebook of Reversed Marches.
The technical core of tavi’s notebook of reversed marches needed plotting Tavi’s twice-daily insect reversal timestamps against the College drain tube pumping schedule that Renn Vos had recorded from the riverfront. Throughout this phase of the systematic cellar-to-cellar mapping of the lantern beetle colony, the crew held fast to reading living shifted weight as a heat map of the hidden trunk. Every brass fitting, every stitched seam. Every thirty-minute lunch crossing had to answer to physical measurement rather than guild politics.
“I thought maybe you’d laugh at me for writing down bug marches, Master Imran,” thirteen-year-old Tavi admitted shyly as he opened his stitched butcher-paper notebook to a ten-day table of arrows and bell-times. “Every morning at a quarter past six they march up to the street curb in three lines. At noon they back down eighteen inches into the dark. And at half past six in the evening they scramble back up to the top.”
