Chapter 14: Three Years of Comments

Harvey Fenner had practiced the sentence for three years, and what came out of him on the bridge was the load rating.

"The span holds four hundred pounds a body length," he called after her. "Which is a very safe number. Katja. It's a very safe number."

She did not turn around.

She walked the way she did when she was following her own card, one foot and then the other, with the braid down her back.

He stopped calling after her at the sag in the middle.

The bridge moved when he shouted, and he would not make her afraid of it.

He followed her in silence instead, forty feet behind.

It was the longest he had gone without talking since the Lift.

His first comment had gone under her third video, six hundred words, written at two in the morning the winter his sister died.

It ended: Tell me one real thing about yourself. Just one.

Her answer came in four minutes, and it was a thumbs-up.

He had stared at the little blue hand for an hour, and then he had understood it.

For a woman frightened of one question, a thumbs-up was the largest thing she knew how to do.

So he had written again the next week, and the week after that.

He had never told her who he was, and he had planned the telling three ways.

In the first, he said it the minute they met, and she vanished to the far end of the island for a week.

In the second, he said it while tying a knot, and he tied the knot wrong for the first time in eleven years.

In the third, he said it at the Cellar fire, and Dot repeated it to the whole camp as a rule.

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