Sect Year 7 · first month · day 4 · the Reserve’s edge at dawn, then the gravel slope and the Ledger gallery
Dawn came up grey over the Reserve. Lin woke on the stone without knowing he had slept, with his cheek against the back of his own cold hand and the third Wheel still shut in his right fist. Pei was asleep sitting against the shelf’s edge, with the lamp gone out in her lap and her book shut on her knees. Her breathing was slow and even. For a while he lay and listened to it, and he counted nothing at all.
He got up carefully. His knees had set in the night, and his ankles, which had been in the water for two days, ached all the way up to the hip. He stood on the far shelf and looked down at the place where the founder’s weight had lain.
There was nothing there. The stone was pale and smooth and dry, with the faint damp of the night on it, and nothing else. He crouched and laid his palm flat where the weight had been. It was only stone, neither warm nor cold. He waited for a face to rise from it, or a voice, and none came. He had thought he might want one, and he found that he didn’t.
