Sect Year 5 · fifth month · day 4 · the Lantern, the black room
The rain kept them two days under the cliff. The lamp-house was a warren of cold rooms cut into the rock behind the Lantern’s door, and its clerks went along the passages with their heads down and their sleeves pushed back. Nobody sent for Lin. On the second morning he sat at a table by the window with Pei and ate bread and dried fish. He listened to the drip from the rock above the doorstep, and he found that he was counting the drips. He stopped, and then started again, because stopping seemed to cost more than counting did.
Pei caught him at it that afternoon. He had his eyes shut and his lips moving over a shape that was not a word, and he opened them when she set the bowl down beside him. “It’s the cat,” he said, before she could ask. “I keep getting as far as the ear.”
“Then stop reaching for it,” said Pei. “You’re trying to catch it like a fish. Lost things come back when you’re looking at something else.”
“Who told you that?”
“Nobody. It’s what happens with my book. I lose a page, and I find it when I’ve stopped hunting.” She sat down and opened the book at the rule, and she didn’t look up again for a long while, which he took to mean she had decided not to watch him try.
