Sect Year 5 · ninth month · day 2 · the Lantern’s house, Glass Shelf
Lin woke before light on the cot in the black room and lay still, because something in the room had changed and he didn’t yet know what it was. The blue from the glass lay across the ceiling as it always did. The cold came off the wall in its slow waves. The lamp on its hook above the cot had burned down to a bead of red, and the air smelled of oil and wet rock. He listened, and then he understood. The sound was not there.
The hum had gone from one pane.
He could hear the rest of them. The long low note ran along the wall from the sea end to the cliff, steady and unrushed. It came up through the boards and into the frame of the cot and into his jaw, as it had come every morning since they climbed the shelf road in the rain. But beside the frame. There, the pane stood, there was a gap in the sound, small and exact, like the missing step of a stair that a foot finds in the dark.
He sat up. His left hand closed on the iron rail beside the cot and stopped halfway, as it always did, and the iron was cold enough to bite. He held on until the shaking eased. Then he got up in his stockings and went to the head of the black…
