The Aurora Borealis Keeps Its Lament novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: Two Names on One Paper

I slept badly, with my wrist burning under the blanket and his answer going round in my head.

I never planned to leave you.

Then why had he put his name on the list in March?

I was still turning it over when Sabina brought me a coffee and the draft of Iker's paper.

"Only a quick read," she said, setting both on my desk. "He's presenting it to the Institute in six weeks. It's the work of his life, and you know his figures better than anyone."

The title page had two names on it.

Montalvo and Lorca.

"Both of you?" I said.

"He insisted. I'm only the hands." She smiled, small and sincere. "I take the dictation, I tidy the tables. He's so tired these days, Alba. I do what I can to help."

"Thank you for looking after him."

"Someone has to." She touched my shoulder and left.

I sat down with the paper and a pencil, the way I used to do every Friday.

It took me twenty minutes to find the first error.

Table 3 gave the onset of the great auroral arc as 21:14.

I had the night log open beside me, ten years of it, in neat columns.

The onset on that date was 21:41.

The digits had been turned around, and it was not a slip Iker would make in a thousand years.

He had once corrected a printer's decimal point in an elevator, at a conference, from memory.

I turned the page.

The error in Table 5 was bigger.

A reading of 3.8 had become 8.3.

A third number had been rounded up in a way that made the pattern in the graph look cleaner.

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