WE ALWAYS RETURNED to Fane for sleep, unless it was on a day before one of your trips to the forest with Jorne.
These were numerous. I did not join you—preferring to use the additional time to widen the reach of my balloon journeys. I was enjoying my work again and I was particularly interested in an unusual conglomeration of chemical imbalances occurring over the southern seas. These turned out to be non-threatening, but the novelty of the task was pleasurable. I continued in this vein, making ever-vaster sweeps that yielded more and more data with which to build a picture of the carbon dioxide dispersion across the northern hemisphere. I could not remember ever having lost myself in work so much.
You, meanwhile, lost yourself in whatever Jorne taught you in the forest. It was mostly hunting. Your taste for meat had been piqued by the spring gathering, and I would often smell smoke and burning flesh coming from the hills and know it was you. Sometimes you would not come back, choosing to sleep beneath the stars instead.
Your school became secondary; a necessary thing which you endured but did not enjoy as much as you had. Cliques had evolved in the playground, and your friendship with Lukas drifted. The difference in your sizes was becoming apparent too. Lukas, along with the other boys, had developed broad shoulders, a lean jaw and a longer, tauter midriff, whereas you still held onto the puppy fat of your childhood like the stained and perishing security blanket you did not cast off until your sixth birthday.
But you did not mind. You were still friends with Zadie, at whom I occasionally noticed you watching dreamily, and you had Jorne and the endless trips into the forest.
I did not mind this time apart. I became content in the peace of my own work, which I did by the light of Jorne’s stove. Sometimes I would suddenly pause in my analysis of whatever streams of data I had gathered that day and find myself at the door of your room. I would stand there, breathing, taking in the array of artefacts and wondering what it was you were finding in them. There was fear in what I felt, but a kind of envy too.
Occasionally I would enter the room and sit for a while with a book, unopened on my lap. But mostly I would close the door and return to my work, filling a cup with hurwein on the way.
YEARS WENT BY like this. Then one summer evening you walked into the kitchen and seemed different, somehow. That puppy fat was finally melting from your cheeks and abdomen. You were taller, heavier around the eyes, and I could just make out a shadow of hair above your lips and around your chin.
‘We’re going to a waterfall,’ you said, your voice a cracked baritone. ‘It’s quite a hike so we’ll be gone for two days.’
I paused, still reflecting on your appearance, and took a sip of hurwein.
‘What about school?’ I said.
‘It’s summer, Ima, there is no school.’
‘Oh.’
‘Why don’t you come?’
‘Where?’
You gave a quizzical frown; a near perfect yet, I imagined, unintended mimicry of Jorne’s.
‘To the waterfall. I just told you.’
‘Oh, sorry. No, not this time.’
Your lips tightened.
‘That’s what you always say. Why not?’
I gestured at my charts.
‘I have work. I’m sorry.’
‘It doesn’t look much like work to me,’ he said, nodding at my cup.
I sat back, affronted. Who was this boy? I did not know him.
‘I have apologised, Reed. I will come next time.’
‘Fine,’ you said, though the shake of your head and roll of your eyes told me otherwise.
‘Have fun,’ I called, staring at the slammed door.
I did not have to work at all; I just did not want to walk twenty miles through the forest to see falling water. I brushed the charts away, filled my cup and watched you and Jorne trudge off into the trees. Then I went to the Room of Things.
I felt more emboldened than usual, no doubt by the hurwein. I ran my fingers over the objects, deciphering each one’s function from its form and extrapolating its history—what it had seen, how many hands had held it, etc.—and eventually I came across the muddle of devices Jorne had used to display the quantum telescope recordings. I took these and sat down in a dusty, red armchair.
In addition to the Sunspot and projecting unit, there were two further devices strung with