The Aurora Borealis Keeps Its Lament novel · Chapter 18 of 24
Chapter 18: Raised Lines
Iker's POV
I heard the paper land in front of me.
It was a good sheet, heavy, the kind Sabina chose for the Institute's reports, and the table creaked as she set it down.
"There you are, Iker," she said kindly. "Take as long as you need."
The whole room was watching me.
I could feel them in the quiet, as I had felt every room I had ever walked into.
I lifted the page and held it to the side of my face, the way I always did.
At the edge of my sight there was a grey field, a few black lines, a smear that was perhaps a curve.
I had known there would be nothing more.
Sabina knew it too.
She had picked the one graph in the report that had no numbers printed on its axes.
"Take your time," she said again.
I put the page down.
The silence stretched, and I let it.
Then a chair moved, and a sheet slid across the wood with a different sound, stiffer and rougher, and her hand covered mine for a moment on the table.
"This is the same night," Alba said in my ear, so low that no one else could hear. "I made it from the log. The peak's on the left. Start there."
She took her hand away.
I laid my fingertips on the paper.
The lines were hot from the machine and stood up from the page, and they were exactly where she had told me they would be.
"Director," I said. "The peak begins on the left edge, a little under a third of the way across."
My finger climbed.
"It rises for roughly half an hour, in two steps. There's a shoulder here, at the first step. Then the main climb."
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