Sect Year 7 · eleventh month · night of day 9 · the sixty-fifth life: Oster Bend, his ninth year
Lin had hardly let go of the record-room door before it struck its frame with a flat wooden slap. The lamp on the desk bent its flame, and the shadows along the shelves jumped and settled. Su did not look up. She had heard that door slam for years, and she had long since stopped flinching at it, though she had never once asked him to close it gently.
He hung his coat over the back of a chair. The grey cloth parcel inside it knocked once against the wood, and he left it where it was. He had unwrapped it once since the Reaches, to show Su, and had not taken it out again. The bronze inside had made no sound since then, and he had stopped listening for one.
Su turned a page. She had pinned her hair up with a plain wooden stick, and there was ink along the side of her right hand where it rested on the paper. The record lay open between them with the lamp at one corner. She read the day’s entry in the flat voice she kept for things she didn’t mean to soften.
